John Linton
I briefly mentioned a few days ago in these musings that I had decided that the time had come to take the next step in the management of Exetel not just from my point of view and needs but to better meet the requirements of every person who works in Exetel in any position (plus the needs of our customers and suppliers in some circumstances). We began this project last Tuesday and Wednesday by having two brief meetings at which we discussed the concepts and outlined the five major aspects of the end system.
Since more people have begun to give some thought to the basic design of this system the concepts that I loosely described have begun to firm up in to a true GURUS:
"Grand Universal Report on Unwelcome Scenarios"
I re-listed the number of reports/graphs/numbers that I look at each day in fulfilling my roles at Exetel and came up with a little over 300 separate data sets (now there's a word I haven't used for a very long time) and I went on to add another 100 or so that I was pretty sure other people within Exetel would also look at on a multi-daily basis - there may well be more than that.
So the current aim for the GURUS is to display a single number on two or three screens around the North Sydney office and from a screen able to be displayed on any PC in the world at the top and then a single number against each of the ten different "departments" that comprise Exetel.
If the number is 'zero' then there is nothing happening within Exetel at that moment in time that requires 'attention'. Clearly the company number couldn't be 'zero' if one, or more, of the ten departments registered a number other than zero. The 'departments' displayed on the screen would be 'ranked' based on the number being dispayed at that point in time.
The number itself is derived from measuring over 400 seperate 'data sets' in the various devices that Exetel uses to run its business. These devices and the data base include:
Over 50 Servers
Over 16 LNS, Core and Border Routers
Over 100 GigE accesses and cross connects
Cerberus help desk servers
IronPort spam filtering servers
Allot P2P filtering
PeerApp P2P Caching
Mitel VoIP PABX
Asterisk messaging servers
Activities of over 65,000 customer services and over 5,000 'in progress' customer transactions
etc, etc
The whole 400, or in a department case some lesser number relevant to their direct responsibilities, are aggregated against a set of user selected times and values (the values reflecting the relative importance of the individual 'data set'). The main 'number' will be updated each second (or some other user defined period) based on the data collectors retrieving the current values from each of the nominated 'data sets'.
If any number is 'out of the acceptable range' then the indivdual responsible for that part of Exetel's operations will be 'messaged' telling them which report to look at (via a 'click here for details').
Exetel has recently initiated detailed job goals for each of its personnel and zero defect programs for each of its departments. It's the intention to use the GURUS data collectors to also report (not publicly) against the agreed job goal performance for each person within Exetel and the progress of each department's Zero Defect program.
While, poorly described in the way I've done above, this may seem like some Orwellian 1984, cloud cuckoo land inflexible, and therefore, useless attempt at substituting computer reporting for 'real' management - it isn't. I, and many other people within Exetel, constantly refer to these hundreds of reports and graphs every moment of the day and it's becoming very time consuming.
This GURUS attempt is just a logical step along the way to give each Exetel person additional assistance in exercising their decision making abilities and providing extra capabilities and the original concept was based on me thinking about how I could reduce my information reviewing workload.
I'm quite excited about seeing just how much of this concept we can bring to reality.