Bladewatch.com

BBC news

The apprentice candidates need to do some IT support

Let me introduce the Apprentice which is currently running on BBC in the UK, the background is here, but basically people opt to go through a series of trials in order to get the chance to win a job working for Sir Alan Sugar.

Anyway, there are two teams which are competing to complete that task, the team that is unsuccessful have to then justify their actions. I watching it last night with my wife and was exclaiming that it’s all about the pre-answers!

Let me step back for two seconds. I work in IT, when there is a system outage, a meeting will be called to discuss the outage, the steps taken to resolve it and how we can prevent it from happening again. As part of this, it’s my job to have what I call the pre-answers, the answers to the expected questions so that I can represent IT properly, illustrate what the issues are and at the same time illustrate these key features:

1. IT (we) understand the business impact
2. IT (we are) is committed to delivery and preventing unexpected outages, in doing so we might require some business or application assistance or buy-in
3. IT (we) will make the necessary changes to production to improve service where possible, using the change process as appropriate.

Therefore in a grid service failure, the traders press calculate nothing happens and everything seizes, the kind of things I might be expected to know, to have answers to are below:

• What actually happened, what component activities, or actions constituted to the loss of service – the database filled up
• What steps were taken to resolve the outage, including the teams involved – for example restart the ingres database, application support to re-submit their jobs
• What steps IT have taken to resolve, or are going to take to prevent – for example a change to re-configure the database, and archive off old jobs to an archive database – might even be buy a new server and bring online in the next few months/year.
• What steps we need the application or support teams to take – are there any steps we can take to validate jobs before submitting them to grid?
• What actions we will take with monitoring, with verifying system configurations to ensure that everything is set up correctly in line with vendor and support teams recommendations.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.