Gary Drumm – PMP, ITIL

ITIL is the Information Technology Infrastructure Library.  It’s basically a framework for effectively providing IT services within an organization, either internally, or externally.  These services include helpdesk (or service desk, as it’s commonly described in the ITIL world), release management, incident management, configuration management, change management, etc.  The idea is that there is a standard or best practice for handling every aspect of your IT operations.

Six Sigma, of course, is often associated with quality or manufacturing, but it is really about how to reduce error by implementing quality into the processes and continually improving those processes to meet the ever-changing customer demands and market dynamics.  The idea, of course, if you pay attention to quality in while performing the work, then you reduce defects and re-work later on, ultimatley making an organization more profitable

Project management is the methodology of completing projects.  How to define them, how schedule them, how to assess risks and maintain open communications.  It’s how to get projects done and projects are always ongoing within IT organizations.

What all of these disciplines are really about is process.  There’s a process in ITIL for how to handle a customer’s incident.  There’s a process in Six Sigma for how to measure and interpret metrics and then apply that information to further refine other organizational processes.  There’s a process in project management for how to handle project change requests.  Of course these are not the only three processes in these frameworks.  The frameworks themselves are a collection of multiple processes.

But what does this have to do with IT operations?  How does this get the customer’s printer working again, or restore that failed blade server in the data center?  It occurs to me that IT is, in and of itself, a collection of processes as well.  Clearly IT benefits from ITIL, Six Sigma, and project management, but is there a comprehensive set of tools that one can use to incorporate all three of these frameworks?  That is the topic of my thesis.

Wow!  It’s already February and I’m just getting around to the first post of 2010.  Where’d January go?  So I’m back in school for another exciting semester of college book learnin’, I’m taking several writing courses (yeah, go figure), and math courses.  If I have time towards the end of the term I’m hoping to knock out another technical certification as well, but we’ll see.  The writing course is a little more brutal than I had anticipated, so I may not be able to get any extra time.

To top things off, things have been crazy busy at work.  Getting back from what effectively amounted to two week vacation during Christmas kind of put us behind.  The Support staff is getting close to 100 tickets or more per day.  Now, that’s not bad if you have a staff of 5 full time support techs who do nothing but handle support tickets, but we don’t have that many.  We have a total of 8 technicians, not all of whom are taking calls and handling tickets all day.  They also do installs, upgrades, reconfigurations, corrections, and internal support functions as well, so my staff is pretty busy.

The good news is, though, we’re looking to hire some new techs in the next couple of weeks, and the company is on the verge of releasing a new version of our software that addresses some pretty major issues that are currently flooding the support desk, so if we can just keep plugging the dyke until we can get the release done, I think the volume will slow to a more workable in the next few weeks.

More good news, the company is preparing to take on a new initiative called the Technology Services Division, which is expand our service offerings and allow us to increase our revenues and provide our customers with better product and service offerings.  It will also allow us to solidify some processes and procedures that we desperately need to get addressed.  The best part is, I wrote the business plan for the TSD, and I’m likely be tapped to head it up, so I’m pretty excited about that.

Lastly, I’m being tasked with writing a research paper for school and the topic I chose was Management versus Leadership, should be a fun topic.  I’ll post my final paper when it’s complete.

OK.  Clear’s 4G Wimax is NOT ready for primetime.  It’s probably OK if there are no other options in your area, and getting intermittent access is acceptable for you, but if you’re like me, and you want fast and reliable, then it’s just not going to work out for you.  So I’m dumping 4G for now.

I’m also dumping traditional DSL.  Well, since I’ve had the same DSL line since 1999, I don’t know if I can exactly call it “traditional”, but it was the classic DSL service that started it all.  At any rate, I replaced my Internet access with AT&T’s U-Verse Max Turbo broadband.  For less than the 4G was costing me, and only slightly more than my old DSL, I’m getting 24 mbps download and up to 3mbps upload.  That’s fast!  That’s faster than most of my 802.11 B wireless network can understand, so it actually pegs out around 11 mbps.  Looks like I’ll need to upgrade my infrastructure to support this blistering new speed.

Oh, and to topit all off, the service was installed on Christmas Eve.  I nice little present from the AT&T Santa, though the tech did screw up the phone line in my office, so they’ll have to come back out and fix that next week, but that’s OK.  I’m surfing the web at blistering speeds, and the wife is happy, good enough for me. ;0

Well, I’m happy to report that I finally broke down and bought a USB to VGA adapter for my laptop, allowing me to have two external moitors in addition to my primary laptop monitor, giving me three screens total. I know, I know, it’s not really a big deal, but it is nice to be running two large screens again.  Now I can go back to doing my main work on the larger screens, and use the smaller laptop screen for my iTune playlist.  I’m such a geek.

On another note, the 4G wireless seems to be performing better the last few days.  Good thing too, I guess, since I’d have to cancel the service and return it on Monday if I wanted to avoid an early terminiation fee from Clearwire.

Finally, Anthony and I are going to be working on a couple of electronics projects ove rthe holidays.  We bought an electric cricket kit (a little device that makes really annoying “chirps” when it’s in a dark place,) and micro-recorder kit that allows the user to record a 40 second message and play it back.  We’ll be putting both kits together over the next couple of weeks.  The really cool thing is that both kits require soldering, so I’ll get to teach Anthony how to use this important electronics tool.

Wow!  Holy crap!  What a load of… OK.  So I have the Clear.Com service at home and man can I say that this really sucks!  I am so not impressed with the connectivity, the consistency, or even the speed.  What’s the point of having a broadband service that isn’t always broadband.  I ran a test at one point today and my speed was literally .05 mbps.  That’s 5K!  Are you freaking serious?!!  5K “broadband”.  I might as well bust out with the trusty old 2800 BAUD modem.  So yeah, I guess I’m a little pissed off that this service is SO bad!  I can’t even use this as a backup, even if I did want to fork over $100 for a dual WAN/load balancing router.

And the USB isn’t any better.  I had it connected at work for a couple of hours today then, all of the sudden, it disconnected and couldn’t find a signal again.  I didn’t move the computer.  I wasn’t even touching it at the time.  Just one second it’s on, the next second it’s off and can’t reconnect.

So I’m kind of torn here.  Do I call these guys up and say “Hey, your service REALLY, REALLY, REALLY, REALLY sucks and I want my money back!”, or do I give them the benefit of the doubt, since it’s such a new service, and see if they iron out the kinks in the next few days?  Either way, I can’t use them as my primary provider, the service is just too unreliable at this point. I’ll figure out what I want to do in the next couple of days and post my decision here for the whole world to read.

I may just dump AT&T and Clearwire and get Google’s new TiSP service: http://www.google.com/tisp/install.html, I’ll probably get better connectivity than I am now anyway.

OK, so I got the new Clear.Com 4G broadband service for my house… mostly to become my primary Internet connection when my DSL fails, which happens way more than you might think.  Now granted, Clear is just moving into my area, so I’m going to give them the benefit of the doubt as to why the service is just so-so.  The plus to the service is that is is considerably faster on downloads, a little over twice to three times as fast, but the uploads are horrible, averaging around 80kbps at the moment.  My DSL was only 1.2 mbps download, but the upload was much faster at around 300kbps, on average.

I guess the coolest thing about the service is that I also got a USB broadband card for my, or my wife’s laptop, as an “emergency” backup… you know, in case the power goes out and we must get online to check our email, or post our latest musings to Facebook.  The problem I’m having with it is that there are apparently no drivers for Windows 7, so I’m having a “little” difficultiy getting it to work at the moment.

All in all, however; I think this service will serve us extremely well.  My next mission is to acquire a dual WAN port router and configure it with load balancing and failover, so if one of my connections goes down, the network will simply route the traffic off of the next port.  That will be pretty sweet for a home setup, and all for less than what oher people pay for AT&T’s U-Verse service… not too bad.

Haven’t had a chance to really sit down and write it up yet, but on October 30th I passed 2 exams: The CompTIA 220-601 and the 220-602, officially moving  me to A+ Technician status.  After 17 years in the IT field, I finally managed to pass the most “basic” of certifications, LOL.

The 602 test was actually pretty easy.  I got an 850 out of a possible 900, roughly 94%.  The 601… the “Essentials” (i.e. “foundation”) test was actually MUCH more difficult.  It required a score of 675 to pass, or 75%, I got… a 690!  That’s 76%.  A “C” in “essentials”, and I’ve been a IT professional for a little over 17 years!  I’ve run IT operations for multi-million dollar companies, performed HUNDREDS of system installations, worked on thousands of desktop systems, and am familiar with over 15 different operating system versions and flavors and I still only got 76% of the answers correct on this exam.  That’s a tough exam!

Ironically, I spent over $6000 and took 18 months to prepare for the PMP, and I wasn’t as nervous as I was about A+. I must say, I have a whole new respect for those who pass this test.  It is not an easy thing to do.  So now I’m preparing for the CompTIA Project+ certification.  Having skimmed through the material a couple of times, it doesn’t appear to be any more complex than the PMP, in fact it appears to be muct, much easier.  I’ll take a couple of practice exams this weekend and see how I do.  Regardless, I have to be ready for it by the 20th.  Once complete, I’ll have finally knocked out my first semester towards my B.S. in I.T.

Just sitting here on the couch with my lovely wife, iPod in hand, blogging on my website while the storm of the season falls outside. Apple was absolutely correct about this being a great pocket computer. Speaking of, how many of my readers remember the Apple Newton? There’s another cool piece of technology that was just way ahead of it’s time.