Re: Slight OT: Remote DBA team & effective support & communication

  • From: TESTAJ3@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • To: Dave.Herring@xxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Wed, 2 Nov 2011 10:30:09 -0400

Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII"
I've seen this problem with people sitting next to each other, email is 
unfortunately easily ignored and now there is no tracking of what is done, 
requests, etc.

Eventually all of our oem alerts will be sending out help desk 
tickets(just as if someone called in), which cannot be ignored as they 
have escalations if no one picks it up and resolves it.

Not sure that helped much.

joe





From:
Herring Dave - dherri <Dave.Herring@xxxxxxxxxx>
To:
oracle-l List <oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date:
11/02/2011 10:24 AM
Subject:
Slight OT: Remote DBA team & effective support & communication
Sent by:
oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx



I'm curious how many of you belong to DBA teams where you rarely, if ever, 
go into an office and work side-by-side with other DBAs on your team.  For 
those who answer "yes, I rarely go into the office ...", then have you 
come up with any effective methods for managing communication and support 
across the team?

My current team is spread across the world in 4 timezones and we use email 
almost exclusively for communication and monitoring.  OEM & crontab 
monitoring is handled by sending us emails for various warning/critical 
events, on which we need to respond within a given amount of time.  We 
also get various information emails from these monitoring jobs to keep 
track of what's going on across the many systems we support.  All this 
leads to a tremendous volume of email.

What have we done to still be effective?  All emails from monitoring jobs 
have a Subject line prefix that categorizes the email, so we can write all 
sorts of Outlook rules to manage the incoming emails.  We've also worked 
hard at making sure we only get emails from these jobs when absolutely 
necessary for our job.  I've also given examples of how to set Outlook 
rules to auto-forward incoming email to your cell phone when it's an 
emergency and you're oncall, even an example of how to create rules with 
multiple ANDs and ORs by flagging emails and then rules against those 
flagged emails.

Yet with all this, emails are still getting ignored and/or half read. 
Volume shouldn't be an excuse, because we all get tons of emails and 
organizational solutions have been presented.  Emails I send out are also 
ignored/half read, so emailing about the issue won't work.

I'm not sure what else to do, which is why I'm asking you all for 
strategies/rules/guidelines that you follow.  Is every DBA REQUIRED to set 
up a set of Outlook rules for managing support-related email?  Do you have 
other methods and are they a requirement?  Email doesn't appear to be 
going away, more systems seem to be 24 x 7 and DBAs seem to be given 
higher demands on what they monitor.  To me it doesn't appear our current 
methods are working, much less handle future increases.

I'm not sure I want responses to this, but is the problem with me and that 
I'm too wordy, have too high of expectations and am a perfectionist?

Hopefully this thread can be a worthwhile discussion and not just ranting 
on others, which I can't help but do when trying to explain my current 
frustation.  Thanks to anyone who is still reading this!

DAVID HERRING
DBA
Acxiom Corporation
EML   dave.herring@xxxxxxxxxx
TEL    630.944.4762
MBL   630.430.5988 
1501 Opus Pl, Downers Grove, IL 60515, USA
WWW.ACXIOM.COM 

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