Case Study 1 - Trailer Manufacturer Background:
John Peters has been running his trailer manufacturing business for 10 years. Over this time, he has build up a database of his customers and all of his technical plans are stored on the main hard drive of a fairly new PC in his office. He has another five PC’s in the office that are all networked and are able to access the main PC via file sharing. These PC’s are a mixture of Windows 2000 and ME machines which are at least 6 years old. His main machine is running XP.
John bought the new machine from a local computer shop with a 3-year “return to shop” warranty but his older machines do not have any support. He has used his local PC World on the few occasions when he has trouble.
The same company he bought the new PC from set up the network and he is able to call them if he has a problem. He has no formal support contract but the day rates they charge seem quite reasonable and it does cover the way the PC’s connect to each other as well as the physical network itself.
Over the last few months, the systems have begun to play up and John is worrying about losing his database but more importantly all of his technical plans for the trailers he builds.
John would also like to expand his business as a company in a nearby county has just lost a large contract and he has a good chance of picking it up.
Health checks findings:
- Whenever anyone has a problem with their computer, they tended to go to the receptionist to report it. She would then ring the relevant company. No records of any of these calls were noted down though
- The company has never had a big failure of their computer systems but if they did, Peter believes they could go about 4 days before they needed to access their information. If they lost their customer database, he believes it would take them about 3 weeks to discover this information from manual records. The technical plans of the trailers are more important and losing these would have a major impact on production. It would probably take 2 weeks of production downtime to re-measure the stock trailers (which only account for 60% of the range). The other trailers would have to be re-created from scratch
- No strategy exists for the ongoing management of the computer systems. When the new XP machine was bought, it took the supplier a day to get the network up and running. Peter would like to upgrade the other machines but is worried how this might put his business at risk. He has to do a new 3 year business plan for his bank manager and he would like to have something in their about upgrading his computer systems
- Peter thought he had a better level of support that was actually the case. The PC and network support gave him at best, 3 days before they could normally attend site. If they were busy, their calendar could be booked up to 10 days in advance. The return to shop warranty promised a 28-day turnaround with no loan machine. This is a major concern as this machine holds all of the data.
Recommendations:
Short Term
- Peters company was without knowing it, starting to do basic service desk and incident management. The fact that a single person dealt with their PC problems is a great starting point. We would advise developing a basic spreadsheet or database to record all of their IT queries with an extra area showing all of the equipment and which supplier support's this (along with phone numbers, support hours and response/fix times)
- Before reviewing the support requirements, Peter should record what level of service he would like to have. This should focus around recovery of data, support of the critical and non-critical PC’s and support of the network. Once he has this in mind, he should approach a number of suppliers and get prices. Some of these suppliers may recommend “Service Improvements” to reach this level of support (such as adding an external hard-drive to his new PC to back the data up once a week). Peter should then balance the “cost vs. service” and decide on a proper support partnership. Once this has been agreed, Service Level Agreements should be set up based around these contracts.
- A strategy for PC and network upgrade’s including a long-term projection and budget should be set up. This should include hardware, operating systems and storage requirements as well as considering peripherals such as printers. This should focus on standardising items around the hardware type and the versions of software if possible.
Long Term
- Their may be other ways of delivering Peters requirements in a more reliable and supportable way. A review of the basic requirements certainly points towards the importance of data back-up but business continuity should also include aspect such as continuing production from another site if a reason occurred why he was unable to access his own location for a while
- Peter’s plans for growth should initiate a capacity review. If he is looking to expand, he may be taking on more staff. If this is the case, his network may need to be revisited. The fact that the new PC is used as the main data store could cause issues, especially if new ranges are produced (increasing the number of plans) or a large number of customers are added to the database.
As you can see from thhe information above, not all of the ITIL processes have been adopted in the case study, only those that will directly benefit the business have been proposed in the recommendations.
The size of the business and its history of issues do not warrant Problem Management at this stage and Change Management is not beneficial until the overall support of the PC’s is sorted out.
The basic PC setup is simple so configuration management would be of little benefit.
The other Service Delivery elements of Availability, IT Business Continuity and Financial Management have been touched upon, but only at a level that would directly benefit the business.