I happen to be UNIX manager at a fortune 150 company oddly enough, and I was formerly an administrator myself. I agree with many of the other people that suggest that is the manager's job. Saying that as a manager, I do feel that it is wise to have employees participate in the process to make sure they have a stake in the process and justifying their jobs existence. I come up with a set of baselines and run those past the folks and make adjustments to them as a team to make sure what we end up with is both sane and accepted. We do this early every year.
Every environment is different as companies and organizations are structured differently. My opinion is that whatever your folks do, DO NOT make the metrics and graphs too complicated, otherwise higher management will not be able to follow the logic and won't accept it. In addition, it is critical to communicate from year to year what the old rules were, what the new ones are, and why they changed. Hopefully the communications of the alterations of rules, numbers, and metrics make it look like the team is taking on more work each year, adapting, and focused on the important initiatives to the business.
In our case the numbers will be going up, and that is because the folks that I support are working with me to Adapt, Automate, and Alter processes (AAA). As we learn, we automate, and mature the process flow, the numbers and metrics will change from year to year. But really what rules and metrics your organization chooses is a judgment call based upon your environment.
We have a lot of internal and application and software diversity, so at an ultra high level, this year we took into account number of servers per administrator, number of O/Ss supported by each administrator (the traditional UNIXs added a very significant weight).
We are always building new graphs and considering new metrics mostly to show our own group how much we've changed, it gives the good workers a sense of accomplishment, and the others the feeling that they need to adapt. This will help us gauge what rules we need to come up with the next year and we always have numbers to justify new headcount when we need it.
Based upon our predicted growth numbers, we'll have to add to our headcount soon, of course there is a freeze on hiring as we're in the later part of the fiscal quarter. I'm battling with the statistics now, but I likely won't win anytime soon, so we're dropping some less important work on the floor, sooner or later we'll get what we need.:)
I hope all goes well in your company, and for your team.
Slashdot Mirror
I happen to be UNIX manager at a fortune 150 company oddly enough, and I was formerly an administrator myself. I agree with many of the other people that suggest that is the manager's job. Saying that as a manager, I do feel that it is wise to have employees participate in the process to make sure they have a stake in the process and justifying their jobs existence. I come up with a set of baselines and run those past the folks and make adjustments to them as a team to make sure what we end up with is both sane and accepted. We do this early every year. Every environment is different as companies and organizations are structured differently. My opinion is that whatever your folks do, DO NOT make the metrics and graphs too complicated, otherwise higher management will not be able to follow the logic and won't accept it. In addition, it is critical to communicate from year to year what the old rules were, what the new ones are, and why they changed. Hopefully the communications of the alterations of rules, numbers, and metrics make it look like the team is taking on more work each year, adapting, and focused on the important initiatives to the business. In our case the numbers will be going up, and that is because the folks that I support are working with me to Adapt, Automate, and Alter processes (AAA). As we learn, we automate, and mature the process flow, the numbers and metrics will change from year to year. But really what rules and metrics your organization chooses is a judgment call based upon your environment. We have a lot of internal and application and software diversity, so at an ultra high level, this year we took into account number of servers per administrator, number of O/Ss supported by each administrator (the traditional UNIXs added a very significant weight). We are always building new graphs and considering new metrics mostly to show our own group how much we've changed, it gives the good workers a sense of accomplishment, and the others the feeling that they need to adapt. This will help us gauge what rules we need to come up with the next year and we always have numbers to justify new headcount when we need it. Based upon our predicted growth numbers, we'll have to add to our headcount soon, of course there is a freeze on hiring as we're in the later part of the fiscal quarter. I'm battling with the statistics now, but I likely won't win anytime soon, so we're dropping some less important work on the floor, sooner or later we'll get what we need. :)
I hope all goes well in your company, and for your team.