I remember a few decades ago when it was proposed to remove the navigator from the flight deck of passenger jets. The same arguments were being made against removing the navigator as are now being made against removing the co-pilot.
I remember a few decades ago when it was proposed to remove one of my teeth. The same arguments being made against removing the tooth are now being made against removing my heart. What could possibly go wrong?
Its a redundancy and backup problem, whereas removing the navigator (or flight engineer) was a technological progress event. In those situations higher technology basically replaced those positions with fancy analog electronics, now more or less emulated with microcontrollers.
The copilots main job, more or less, is to learn from the pilot how to pilot a plane, while helping the busy pilot. And I'm not talking about wiggling the wings, which anyone with an ATP cert mastered about 500 hours ago, but more about judgment.
In other words, no apprentices rapidly means no masters, and that is the real danger.
My grandfather made sure his whole crew, even the lowliest gunner, could sorta fly the B-24 and could land. Absolute 100%. Theres a huge difference between hand-eye coordination of steering a plane, and having the judgment of a pilot. Outsiders think being a pilot is a tech job, but its really more of a management job.
Most such situations never make the news, because there was a pilot there who took over and handled what the automation could not.
How does a computer make a judgment call about every possible theoretical non-deadlined failure mode? All planes have something broken or semi-broken on them and sometimes theres pretty exciting interactions.
How does a computer make a judgment call about flying into storms / turbulence?
You missed the most important task for the PNF, learn by osmosis, or occasionally even semi-formal training, how to eventually become a PF. On rare occasions PNF teaches PF how to do something interesting. Of course sometimes that goes to extremes and the PF spends so much time trying to teach the PNF how to use the new tracking laptop that they fly past the airport.
Another point which I've never understood, is the PF might technically be able to fly alone. But I've never heard of an accident, incident, or close call where the PNF just sat around and watched while sipping coffee or flirting with the stewardesses. Somehow, during a crisis, there is always more than enough to do to keep two pilots busy, and often they save the plane and all the lives. I would expect that PNF-free flights would have spectacularly higher crash/death rates.
If what they say is true, then why wouldn't it be a constant ongoing process rather than life just origination a few times?
My theory is that at one point, all railroads and telephone companies grew from one point, and migrated and sprouted in new areas, rather than a dude in the sky dropping them on the earth fully grown as seen now.
Of course, that would imply if railroad and telephone companies were once generated out of primordial ooze, they could be generated now, perhaps as we speak.
But, at least around here, no RR and phone companies have formed out of the ooze in at least decades. Oh sure reorgs and mergers and spinoffs and new brands, but they all fundamentally connect physically to the ancients.
If all the niches are full, theres no space for new simple life to fit... Also modern more evolved life would probably eat it or ruin its environment. Aerobic lifeforms have sure made life rough on the remaining anaerobes over the past billion or so years, humans have been downright nice to the environment in comparison.
Finally, the last thing you will want to avoid is confusion. Keep short, up-to-date, easy to read instructions for each and every system.
You forgot, easy to find. We have all that stuff, somewhere, on one of our three separately maintained intranet sites, randomly filed under tools, procedures, customers, lists, who knows what. No search function of course. It takes at least 15 minutes to find something. Of course you really need to respond within 5 minutes or so. Oh well. So its mostly used as a bludgeon tool for the endless monday morning quarterbacking / blamestorming / 20:20 hindsight sessions.
This is a general systemic problem for all NOCs, so any design features that make it simpler to QUICKLY without the benefit of hindsight figure out what to do is great. Folks whom don't know, think the problem is just seeing, so you get useless videowalls and multiple tools monitoring the same thing equally poorly. The real delay is not seeing something up in red, but figuring out what to do about it. Procedure management is, in some ways, more important than monitoring.
YES, we do and it will be literally set in stone. Once the design is in place, the concrete to be poured will make many alterations, such as new external cabling, venting or ducting next too impossible.
He's talking about changes like workload, products, procedures, markets. A company can move pretty dramatically over the lifetime of "concrete" and that'll have staggering impact on the design (or at least on the success) of a NOC. You need to be able to reconfigure, at least a little.
and then one of them shows up with a Doctors note that says the lights have to be dim and the temperature bellow 60 at all times you're going to have drama.
Ha ha ha, the real drama is two conflicting doctors notes and a union contract that you can't force them to switch shifts. That, is high comedy for those not directly involved, and I've seen it.
Some enterprising tier 1 folks discovered that at the very back of the room was a 3 foot tall crawl space.
At one NOC, about 20 years ago, we had a terribly overworked cooler that had to be turned way down (near freezing) to keep up. We also had no fridge in the NOC. Well, until I taught my coworkers how to store food and drink under the cooler. Company had a fit claiming the food would attract rodents whom would gnaw the cables, and we got a fridge. Enough said. Tried to get a microwave by threatening to hold my TV dinner in front of one of the microwave links, but didn't get a microwave out of it, so this strategy doesn't always work.
You may wish to add animated graphical elements, flashing lights etc. These should only be used for show-and-tell with clients and investors.
Right now our alert board has something useless on it from 8/30 a week ago that is still blinking scrolling away a week later. Totally irrelevant and annoying and meaningless but it is too internally politically correct to simply zap it.
Thankfully they did it in javascript so I was able to 'forbid' the page using the noscript addon so its not so annoying.
NOC designer lesson #1 - If you make a terrible design, and staff it with intelligent people, they WILL find a way to "fix" your design, almost certainly not the way you would have preferred.
If Solid Snake could hide in a janitors cart not a cardboard box - he'd go anywhere.
In my unfortunately extensive experience with this over the decades, the problem is not so much James Bond sneaking in, its "trash bags" full of laptops and HDTVs sneaking out. Even in the "best cities". Everythings gotta be locked down, even/especially in a security theater environment. And all employees need at least one lockable drawer for their purse, cellphone, spare change, insulin syringes, whatever.
You really need to understand what security theater is before you plan your "cool security system". Good security can be annoying, so sometimes people do the security theater thing and install annoying things mistakenly thinking that must make it secure. All the biometric hand scanner, card reader, and DNA sampler will do is annoy the janitor as he hauls his bag-o-laptops out the door.
The worst thing you can do is contract out the janitor to a random collection of temporary illegals. Then anyone can/will just walk in, block the door open, empty the offices, and no one thinks it odd. At least if you have a direct employee, at least HR had a chance to screen them and at least one person on site might know whom they are full access to the entire facility.
(I had a previous employer that actually did put up a screen shot of all-OK Net View or whatever, for VIP visits.)
This is a somewhat important point, that at the marketing designed NOCs I worked at, we did have a "system" to make it all happy for sales presentations. Even if we were in the middle of a fiber cut, the big screen would be all green for two minutes while they watched the rats in the cage. Then back to work.
If the whole purpose is to look cool to ignorant customers, you don't want to show customers that half the network is down.
I currently work at a place like that. No, not a nuke plant, but the kind of place that has a very distinct and obvious physical air gap firewall between the production/engineering network and gear and the IT and internet network equipment. As in, not only can you can not browse facebook or read email viruses on production gear, its physically separate. We do have some cubes with wiring for both, such as mine, but those cube dwellers are those very few considered cluefull enough to be safe.
This makes things like IOS upgrades and the equivalent kind of interesting, since they originally come from the inet.
Also, on TV they only have to pay for the bits facing the camera. The rest is all plywood set design. Money is an issue.
Trust me, at the marketing-designed NOCs I've worked at, they don't even waste paint on the parts not visible from "the window", much less plywood. The angles of view are a little bit bigger than a TV camera, but not much.
I've found nothing beats a whiteboard for figuring something out or just tracking status of a short term issue.
I suppose it depends a lot on the industry, but in the telecom world at multiple NOCs etc, whiteboards usually get used more to do temporary patches, than in problem isolation or status tracking.
Kind of like, well, this card/fiber/server is dead, so we'll temporarily set up #1 over there, and #2 goes there, and #3 on that one,hmm #4 is just SOL, or maybe we can move #1 to this in order to free up space for #4 and #5, etc, etc, etc... Eventually the diagram looks good enough for the team to implement it and then we go go go. Unless the whiteboard is not installed in the NOC, in which case we waste valuable downtime (mis-)copying it all to paper and walking back to work.
4. Lockers outside the NOC for staff. Make them nice, tall and big, and nobody shares.
A locker-room with showers, connected to a workout room with treadmills and stuff, is almost a requirement for shift work. Nothing eliminates the "mid shift snoozies" like 5 minutes on the treadie. Or a semi-serious workout in place of lunch.
My advice is no webcams, maybe even no security cams. Guys don't care, but the women found it extremely creepy that some dirt bag was watching them stretch and bounce around, so they either complained or refused to use the facility. Now a glass wall, where they can see you, but you can see them, is a perfectly adequate non-creepy substitute if you're worried about people collapsing.
Speaking of cams, for all the time I've worked, women have complained about working 2nd or 3rd shift and parking in an empty pitch black parking lot. Come on guys, how much would it cost to light the freaking thing and stick a camera out there? Or have the architect design it so the security guard at his desk can directly look out the window at the "NOC" parking lot? I would think that from a discriminatory legal standpoint, intentionally designing a hostile work environment for women or an environment that makes the company liable for creating an unsafe work environment for women is probably a legal risk that is Oh So Cheap to fix that at the design phase and oh so expensive to settle, even out of court, when something very bad happens to one of your female employees in the parking lot...
4. Are you putting multiple tiers in the same room? This is "best practice" if you do it right.
Horrible idea. I encourage all my competitors to implement that idea as fast as possible.
You ever actually work in a NOC? I have, for decades.
You ever watched "Office Space" with the scene where the guy is utterly unable to concentrate because his cube is next to the receptionists cube "Welcome to innitech, please hold... Welcome to innitech, please hold.. Welcome to innitech, please hold". Horrible awful idea. Good if you are my competitor, or if you intentionally are trying to destroy your own productivity so as to heroically rescue it later. Otherwise a pretty bad idea.
Promote from within, and develop a strategy to give people a career path.
Now we're in daydream mode, that would be the first NOC I've ever even heard of with that.
Do you want flash, or functionality? The two are sometimes complementary,
Sometimes? Sometimes? I'm not trying to be excessively harsh, but only someone with no NOC experience beyond watching TV could make that major and fundamental of an oversight.
It must be grokable in a very short period of time. If you can't look at it for 2 seconds and get a good idea of what's going on, it's too complicated.
Again, newbie mode here. Even 1st level retail customer service takes longer to figure out what problem is. When you REALLY need the big screen, as opposed to using it as a fashion statement, is when the MPLD network routing protocol is not converging after three hours and a team of ten local engineers, three field techs, and half the company at Cisco can't figure out why. Simple enough for the drooling salespeople to explain to customers whom know nothing about NOCs using short one syllable words and simple sentence structure is a marketing requirement not a technical / operational requirement.
Good task lighting. Good lighting period is everything. Pay a real designer to do this.
Personalize the chairs but not the lighting? Again newbie error. Best NOCs I've seen over a couple decades go for dim lighting to keep reflections / glare off the screens. Also a good excuse for no windows.
I see you forgot temperature management? Worst design I ever worked in had stadium seating, and either the HVAC blew air in your eyes which makes them water like hell after a couple hours, or we wore sunglasses which gave marketing/sales an absolute cow, or didn't blow air around so people at the lower seats were freezing while the top seats were sweating. Which is an epic fail, but not quite as bad as the place I worked at that had such good mantraps and powerful UPS/generators that when the power failed, equipment started failing due to lack of air conditioning within 30 minutes and people started failing (fainting, overheated) within an hour. Almost as bad as the "24 hour" NOC I experienced that took months to get the HVAC guys to turn on the ventilation during 2nd and 3rd shift (gotta be green, ya know). Then there's the place I set the thermostat to 73 and pried the dial off and dared anyone to make me reinstall it (and no one did) because clowns would set it to 85 when they personally felt cool and 60 when they personally felt warm, and the rest of us suffered. There is always at least one clown like that in any group of more than 5 people, so frankly you need to eliminate thermostats, or mount them but don't hook them up so clowns can work out their frustrations by adjusting a thermostat that does nothing.
The happiest secure windowless bunker I ever saw (but unfortunately did not work in) was a graphics arts studio/preprint process area where, true, there were no windows, long shifts, and tedious detail oriented work, BUT, BUT this was never shown to anyone outside the company so it was frankly operated something like a rave with moderately loud music and very casual dress code and extremely personalized decor. Everyone working there loved it. No one has ever complained about not having enough windows at a rave (or pretty much any party).
It had no windows, something about being in a run down industrial slum, also they used special $25K color calibrated monitors that supposedly in dim lighting displayed the EXACT same colors as the industrial printing press would output. Not just kind of close, but picky woman 150 different shades of red certified by the printing press manufacturer exact. At least one of the monitors had a strange lightpen like device that you'd stick to the screen to automatically tune the monitor colors to perfection, like as the phosphor slowly faded from day to day.
Did we work together? If so, you'd know me by initials... Trust me, every "operations center" OC NOC NMC built in the last 30 years (And I've worked in several) have had all the cliche bullet points you list and pretty much the same failures.
The most operationally successful (as opposed to marketing successful) "NOC" I ever worked in, was a (small) cube farm with six foot tall walls so we could quietly concentrate when necessary, yet we had a weird aisle configuration so when we needed to collaborate we were mere seconds apart. Also crucial was each cube had a bookcase which we absolutely stuffed with manuals, Oreilly books, software cd/dvds, and a "visitor chair" for collaboration and most importantly beyond all else we each had like two or three complete and separate computer systems to watch things and experiment. Also comfy chairs matter more than a butterfly manager could ever understand.
The second most operationally successful NOC I worked in, could be completely operated by design from home over a VPN. Having a nuclear bomb proof bunker is irrelevant when thunderstorms fill my street with tree branches or we get "the blizard of the century" over a foot of snow in 12 hours. In both scenarios, it was BAU for me to log in over the VPN at home (And if I had lost power/connectivity we had deals to visit coworkers nearby houses as opposed to HQ 20 miles away, and open vouchers at hotels with inet access). Its hard to convince upper management to pay for both work at home gear and a giant unusable video wall.
A final comment is one place I worked at invested about a quarter of a million into the useless video wall, and then the thousand dollar bulbs popped like popcorn to the tune of about 3 FTE per year. In other words we could have paid for 3 more full time staff if we didn't have a useless wall... That wall was a morale poison during each short term crisis, but an absolute morale killer during layoffs. Eventually, as that company circled the drain, they were paying more money for the useless wall, than the staff to watch it. It was useless because it was visually stunning on a large scale, but unreadable for the employees, and pointless because they needed to run the exact same SW on their desks to do the job anyway.
Showing off is a nice aim, but a secondary one. However, if I can combine the two, that's terrific.
I guess you'll have the first operations center in the history of mankind run that way. For a big splash of cold water in the face ask your sales and marketing people what they're thinking and then tell your boss you're making all the decisions from the point of view of a cost center (you guys) as opposed to revenue generation (sales)
In relation to individuality etc. it's not a big issue as the operators are hot-desking anyway.
Ewww, yuck. That usually means packing them in like sardines and creating a nice loud impossible to concentrate environment. Also people coughing all over the keyboards and mice and getting each other sick. Yuck, just yuck. Talk about making the employees feel bad by lowering their status, everyone from the janitor up "has their own place" but only your employees are lowly enough to have to hot desk. Yuck, just yuck. Trust a guy who has worked in operations centers for a couple decades, you're making a huge mistake there. Cubes might suck compared to offices, but the only thing worse than cubes is open plan.
Please, at least from a lice standpoint, don't make them share cordless phone headsets.
Big projected screens showing something management finds important to brag about but the employees will never glance at.
All individuality quashed, no pics of the family etc.
My advice, in all honesty, is to build two. One that actually works, and one that is a star trek mock up. Whenever they did marketing picture shows they hired college age models to "staff" our network management center anyway, so non-operational equipment is not exactly a problem for the models to pose with.
Only way I'd be okay with this is if they give the driver some sort of competency exam. Cars don't normally fall apart and cause accidents...it is usually driver error.
Driver error gets you into bad situations. Equipment quality gets you out of (some) bad situations.
Following too close is a driver error. Under inflated tires with no tread, bad shocks, bad brakes, is what prevents you from curing the problem.
Example, my stopping distance is supposed to be 110 feet or so at 60 mph, but due to shoddy maintenance its more like 300 feet. Bad driving is getting myself into a 200 foot situation. With good gear, no problemo. With bad gear, oops.
Well, if you mean by "screw machine" a machine that makes screws, well, generally they literally stamp fasteners from spools of metal wire. Much faster and more efficient than trying to machine such parts... that would be hideously slow in comparison.
Not a stamper. Think of a metal lathe, then porcupine it with multiple cutting tools and power feeds, to get a turret lathe. Then add even more clockwork/gearing and it can make multiple parts pretty much hands off, and you got a screw machine.
All that clockwork/gearing is complicated as heck to modify compared to feeding a new gcode file into a CNC. However, being hyper-specialized, if you don't need a slow precisely controlled negative X-axis movement or whatever, a screw machine probably has a big ole high tension spring that moves "instantly" vs the CNC slowly methodically and precisely crawling neg x-axis.
As far as hideously slow, you'd be surprised even in ancient history what a couple horsepower and sharp cutting/forming tools can do...
Slashdot Mirror
I remember a few decades ago when it was proposed to remove the navigator from the flight deck of passenger jets. The same arguments were being made against removing the navigator as are now being made against removing the co-pilot.
I remember a few decades ago when it was proposed to remove one of my teeth. The same arguments being made against removing the tooth are now being made against removing my heart. What could possibly go wrong?
Its a redundancy and backup problem, whereas removing the navigator (or flight engineer) was a technological progress event. In those situations higher technology basically replaced those positions with fancy analog electronics, now more or less emulated with microcontrollers.
The copilots main job, more or less, is to learn from the pilot how to pilot a plane, while helping the busy pilot. And I'm not talking about wiggling the wings, which anyone with an ATP cert mastered about 500 hours ago, but more about judgment.
In other words, no apprentices rapidly means no masters, and that is the real danger.
My grandfather made sure his whole crew, even the lowliest gunner, could sorta fly the B-24 and could land. Absolute 100%. Theres a huge difference between hand-eye coordination of steering a plane, and having the judgment of a pilot. Outsiders think being a pilot is a tech job, but its really more of a management job.
Most such situations never make the news, because there was a pilot there who took over and handled what the automation could not.
How does a computer make a judgment call about every possible theoretical non-deadlined failure mode? All planes have something broken or semi-broken on them and sometimes theres pretty exciting interactions.
How does a computer make a judgment call about flying into storms / turbulence?
You missed the most important task for the PNF, learn by osmosis, or occasionally even semi-formal training, how to eventually become a PF. On rare occasions PNF teaches PF how to do something interesting. Of course sometimes that goes to extremes and the PF spends so much time trying to teach the PNF how to use the new tracking laptop that they fly past the airport.
Another point which I've never understood, is the PF might technically be able to fly alone. But I've never heard of an accident, incident, or close call where the PNF just sat around and watched while sipping coffee or flirting with the stewardesses. Somehow, during a crisis, there is always more than enough to do to keep two pilots busy, and often they save the plane and all the lives. I would expect that PNF-free flights would have spectacularly higher crash/death rates.
If what they say is true, then why wouldn't it be a constant ongoing process rather than life just origination a few times?
My theory is that at one point, all railroads and telephone companies grew from one point, and migrated and sprouted in new areas, rather than a dude in the sky dropping them on the earth fully grown as seen now.
Of course, that would imply if railroad and telephone companies were once generated out of primordial ooze, they could be generated now, perhaps as we speak.
But, at least around here, no RR and phone companies have formed out of the ooze in at least decades. Oh sure reorgs and mergers and spinoffs and new brands, but they all fundamentally connect physically to the ancients.
If all the niches are full, theres no space for new simple life to fit... Also modern more evolved life would probably eat it or ruin its environment. Aerobic lifeforms have sure made life rough on the remaining anaerobes over the past billion or so years, humans have been downright nice to the environment in comparison.
Finally, the last thing you will want to avoid is confusion. Keep short, up-to-date, easy to read instructions for each and every system.
You forgot, easy to find. We have all that stuff, somewhere, on one of our three separately maintained intranet sites, randomly filed under tools, procedures, customers, lists, who knows what. No search function of course. It takes at least 15 minutes to find something. Of course you really need to respond within 5 minutes or so. Oh well. So its mostly used as a bludgeon tool for the endless monday morning quarterbacking / blamestorming / 20:20 hindsight sessions.
This is a general systemic problem for all NOCs, so any design features that make it simpler to QUICKLY without the benefit of hindsight figure out what to do is great. Folks whom don't know, think the problem is just seeing, so you get useless videowalls and multiple tools monitoring the same thing equally poorly. The real delay is not seeing something up in red, but figuring out what to do about it. Procedure management is, in some ways, more important than monitoring.
YES, we do and it will be literally set in stone. Once the design is in place, the concrete to be poured will make many alterations, such as new external cabling, venting or ducting next too impossible.
He's talking about changes like workload, products, procedures, markets. A company can move pretty dramatically over the lifetime of "concrete" and that'll have staggering impact on the design (or at least on the success) of a NOC. You need to be able to reconfigure, at least a little.
Thats because he didn't select the best ideas, he selected the ideas coolest to those whom never worked in a NOC.
and then one of them shows up with a Doctors note that says the lights have to be dim and the temperature bellow 60 at all times you're going to have drama.
Ha ha ha, the real drama is two conflicting doctors notes and a union contract that you can't force them to switch shifts. That, is high comedy for those not directly involved, and I've seen it.
Some enterprising tier 1 folks discovered that at the very back of the room was a 3 foot tall crawl space.
At one NOC, about 20 years ago, we had a terribly overworked cooler that had to be turned way down (near freezing) to keep up. We also had no fridge in the NOC. Well, until I taught my coworkers how to store food and drink under the cooler. Company had a fit claiming the food would attract rodents whom would gnaw the cables, and we got a fridge. Enough said. Tried to get a microwave by threatening to hold my TV dinner in front of one of the microwave links, but didn't get a microwave out of it, so this strategy doesn't always work.
You may wish to add animated graphical elements, flashing lights etc. These should only be used for show-and-tell with clients and investors.
Right now our alert board has something useless on it from 8/30 a week ago that is still blinking scrolling away a week later. Totally irrelevant and annoying and meaningless but it is too internally politically correct to simply zap it.
Thankfully they did it in javascript so I was able to 'forbid' the page using the noscript addon so its not so annoying.
NOC designer lesson #1 - If you make a terrible design, and staff it with intelligent people, they WILL find a way to "fix" your design, almost certainly not the way you would have preferred.
If Solid Snake could hide in a janitors cart not a cardboard box - he'd go anywhere.
In my unfortunately extensive experience with this over the decades, the problem is not so much James Bond sneaking in, its "trash bags" full of laptops and HDTVs sneaking out. Even in the "best cities". Everythings gotta be locked down, even/especially in a security theater environment. And all employees need at least one lockable drawer for their purse, cellphone, spare change, insulin syringes, whatever.
You really need to understand what security theater is before you plan your "cool security system". Good security can be annoying, so sometimes people do the security theater thing and install annoying things mistakenly thinking that must make it secure. All the biometric hand scanner, card reader, and DNA sampler will do is annoy the janitor as he hauls his bag-o-laptops out the door.
The worst thing you can do is contract out the janitor to a random collection of temporary illegals. Then anyone can/will just walk in, block the door open, empty the offices, and no one thinks it odd. At least if you have a direct employee, at least HR had a chance to screen them and at least one person on site might know whom they are full access to the entire facility.
(I had a previous employer that actually did put up a screen shot of all-OK Net View or whatever, for VIP visits.)
This is a somewhat important point, that at the marketing designed NOCs I worked at, we did have a "system" to make it all happy for sales presentations. Even if we were in the middle of a fiber cut, the big screen would be all green for two minutes while they watched the rats in the cage. Then back to work.
If the whole purpose is to look cool to ignorant customers, you don't want to show customers that half the network is down.
Can you explain what you mean by "any controls and monitors should be separated by an aisle where you have desks and computers"?
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kozloduy_Nuclear_Power_Plant_-_Control_Room_of_Units_3_and_4.jpg
I currently work at a place like that. No, not a nuke plant, but the kind of place that has a very distinct and obvious physical air gap firewall between the production/engineering network and gear and the IT and internet network equipment. As in, not only can you can not browse facebook or read email viruses on production gear, its physically separate. We do have some cubes with wiring for both, such as mine, but those cube dwellers are those very few considered cluefull enough to be safe.
This makes things like IOS upgrades and the equivalent kind of interesting, since they originally come from the inet.
Also, on TV they only have to pay for the bits facing the camera. The rest is all plywood set design. Money is an issue.
Trust me, at the marketing-designed NOCs I've worked at, they don't even waste paint on the parts not visible from "the window", much less plywood. The angles of view are a little bit bigger than a TV camera, but not much.
I've found nothing beats a whiteboard for figuring something out or just tracking status of a short term issue.
I suppose it depends a lot on the industry, but in the telecom world at multiple NOCs etc, whiteboards usually get used more to do temporary patches, than in problem isolation or status tracking.
Kind of like, well, this card/fiber/server is dead, so we'll temporarily set up #1 over there, and #2 goes there, and #3 on that one,hmm #4 is just SOL, or maybe we can move #1 to this in order to free up space for #4 and #5, etc, etc, etc... Eventually the diagram looks good enough for the team to implement it and then we go go go. Unless the whiteboard is not installed in the NOC, in which case we waste valuable downtime (mis-)copying it all to paper and walking back to work.
4. Lockers outside the NOC for staff. Make them nice, tall and big, and nobody shares.
A locker-room with showers, connected to a workout room with treadmills and stuff, is almost a requirement for shift work. Nothing eliminates the "mid shift snoozies" like 5 minutes on the treadie. Or a semi-serious workout in place of lunch.
My advice is no webcams, maybe even no security cams. Guys don't care, but the women found it extremely creepy that some dirt bag was watching them stretch and bounce around, so they either complained or refused to use the facility. Now a glass wall, where they can see you, but you can see them, is a perfectly adequate non-creepy substitute if you're worried about people collapsing.
Speaking of cams, for all the time I've worked, women have complained about working 2nd or 3rd shift and parking in an empty pitch black parking lot. Come on guys, how much would it cost to light the freaking thing and stick a camera out there? Or have the architect design it so the security guard at his desk can directly look out the window at the "NOC" parking lot? I would think that from a discriminatory legal standpoint, intentionally designing a hostile work environment for women or an environment that makes the company liable for creating an unsafe work environment for women is probably a legal risk that is Oh So Cheap to fix that at the design phase and oh so expensive to settle, even out of court, when something very bad happens to one of your female employees in the parking lot...
4. Are you putting multiple tiers in the same room? This is "best practice" if you do it right.
Horrible idea. I encourage all my competitors to implement that idea as fast as possible.
You ever actually work in a NOC? I have, for decades.
You ever watched "Office Space" with the scene where the guy is utterly unable to concentrate because his cube is next to the receptionists cube "Welcome to innitech, please hold ... Welcome to innitech, please hold .. Welcome to innitech, please hold". Horrible awful idea. Good if you are my competitor, or if you intentionally are trying to destroy your own productivity so as to heroically rescue it later. Otherwise a pretty bad idea.
Promote from within, and develop a strategy to give people a career path.
Now we're in daydream mode, that would be the first NOC I've ever even heard of with that.
Do you want flash, or functionality? The two are sometimes complementary,
Sometimes? Sometimes? I'm not trying to be excessively harsh, but only someone with no NOC experience beyond watching TV could make that major and fundamental of an oversight.
It must be grokable in a very short period of time. If you can't look at it for 2 seconds and get a good idea of what's going on, it's too complicated.
Again, newbie mode here. Even 1st level retail customer service takes longer to figure out what problem is. When you REALLY need the big screen, as opposed to using it as a fashion statement, is when the MPLD network routing protocol is not converging after three hours and a team of ten local engineers, three field techs, and half the company at Cisco can't figure out why. Simple enough for the drooling salespeople to explain to customers whom know nothing about NOCs using short one syllable words and simple sentence structure is a marketing requirement not a technical / operational requirement.
Good task lighting. Good lighting period is everything. Pay a real designer to do this.
Personalize the chairs but not the lighting? Again newbie error. Best NOCs I've seen over a couple decades go for dim lighting to keep reflections / glare off the screens. Also a good excuse for no windows.
I see you forgot temperature management? Worst design I ever worked in had stadium seating, and either the HVAC blew air in your eyes which makes them water like hell after a couple hours, or we wore sunglasses which gave marketing/sales an absolute cow, or didn't blow air around so people at the lower seats were freezing while the top seats were sweating. Which is an epic fail, but not quite as bad as the place I worked at that had such good mantraps and powerful UPS/generators that when the power failed, equipment started failing due to lack of air conditioning within 30 minutes and people started failing (fainting, overheated) within an hour. Almost as bad as the "24 hour" NOC I experienced that took months to get the HVAC guys to turn on the ventilation during 2nd and 3rd shift (gotta be green, ya know). Then there's the place I set the thermostat to 73 and pried the dial off and dared anyone to make me reinstall it (and no one did) because clowns would set it to 85 when they personally felt cool and 60 when they personally felt warm, and the rest of us suffered. There is always at least one clown like that in any group of more than 5 people, so frankly you need to eliminate thermostats, or mount them but don't hook them up so clowns can work out their frustrations by adjusting a thermostat that does nothing.
You forgot the most conflicting goal:
"we will be showing it to our clients"
The happiest secure windowless bunker I ever saw (but unfortunately did not work in) was a graphics arts studio/preprint process area where, true, there were no windows, long shifts, and tedious detail oriented work, BUT, BUT this was never shown to anyone outside the company so it was frankly operated something like a rave with moderately loud music and very casual dress code and extremely personalized decor. Everyone working there loved it. No one has ever complained about not having enough windows at a rave (or pretty much any party).
It had no windows, something about being in a run down industrial slum, also they used special $25K color calibrated monitors that supposedly in dim lighting displayed the EXACT same colors as the industrial printing press would output. Not just kind of close, but picky woman 150 different shades of red certified by the printing press manufacturer exact. At least one of the monitors had a strange lightpen like device that you'd stick to the screen to automatically tune the monitor colors to perfection, like as the phosphor slowly faded from day to day.
Did we work together? If so, you'd know me by initials... Trust me, every "operations center" OC NOC NMC built in the last 30 years (And I've worked in several) have had all the cliche bullet points you list and pretty much the same failures.
The most operationally successful (as opposed to marketing successful) "NOC" I ever worked in, was a (small) cube farm with six foot tall walls so we could quietly concentrate when necessary, yet we had a weird aisle configuration so when we needed to collaborate we were mere seconds apart. Also crucial was each cube had a bookcase which we absolutely stuffed with manuals, Oreilly books, software cd/dvds, and a "visitor chair" for collaboration and most importantly beyond all else we each had like two or three complete and separate computer systems to watch things and experiment. Also comfy chairs matter more than a butterfly manager could ever understand.
The second most operationally successful NOC I worked in, could be completely operated by design from home over a VPN. Having a nuclear bomb proof bunker is irrelevant when thunderstorms fill my street with tree branches or we get "the blizard of the century" over a foot of snow in 12 hours. In both scenarios, it was BAU for me to log in over the VPN at home (And if I had lost power/connectivity we had deals to visit coworkers nearby houses as opposed to HQ 20 miles away, and open vouchers at hotels with inet access). Its hard to convince upper management to pay for both work at home gear and a giant unusable video wall.
A final comment is one place I worked at invested about a quarter of a million into the useless video wall, and then the thousand dollar bulbs popped like popcorn to the tune of about 3 FTE per year. In other words we could have paid for 3 more full time staff if we didn't have a useless wall... That wall was a morale poison during each short term crisis, but an absolute morale killer during layoffs. Eventually, as that company circled the drain, they were paying more money for the useless wall, than the staff to watch it. It was useless because it was visually stunning on a large scale, but unreadable for the employees, and pointless because they needed to run the exact same SW on their desks to do the job anyway.
Showing off is a nice aim, but a secondary one. However, if I can combine the two, that's terrific.
I guess you'll have the first operations center in the history of mankind run that way. For a big splash of cold water in the face ask your sales and marketing people what they're thinking and then tell your boss you're making all the decisions from the point of view of a cost center (you guys) as opposed to revenue generation (sales)
In relation to individuality etc. it's not a big issue as the operators are hot-desking anyway.
Ewww, yuck. That usually means packing them in like sardines and creating a nice loud impossible to concentrate environment. Also people coughing all over the keyboards and mice and getting each other sick. Yuck, just yuck. Talk about making the employees feel bad by lowering their status, everyone from the janitor up "has their own place" but only your employees are lowly enough to have to hot desk. Yuck, just yuck. Trust a guy who has worked in operations centers for a couple decades, you're making a huge mistake there. Cubes might suck compared to offices, but the only thing worse than cubes is open plan.
Please, at least from a lice standpoint, don't make them share cordless phone headsets.
Also, we only ever hire attractive staff.
Where do I send my resume?
Lastly, we will be showing it to our clients
In other words its going to all be for show.
Big projected screens showing something management finds important to brag about but the employees will never glance at.
All individuality quashed, no pics of the family etc.
My advice, in all honesty, is to build two. One that actually works, and one that is a star trek mock up. Whenever they did marketing picture shows they hired college age models to "staff" our network management center anyway, so non-operational equipment is not exactly a problem for the models to pose with.
Only way I'd be okay with this is if they give the driver some sort of competency exam. Cars don't normally fall apart and cause accidents...it is usually driver error.
Driver error gets you into bad situations. Equipment quality gets you out of (some) bad situations.
Following too close is a driver error. Under inflated tires with no tread, bad shocks, bad brakes, is what prevents you from curing the problem.
Example, my stopping distance is supposed to be 110 feet or so at 60 mph, but due to shoddy maintenance its more like 300 feet. Bad driving is getting myself into a 200 foot situation. With good gear, no problemo. With bad gear, oops.
ASIC vs generic CPU analogy FTW!
More like discrete logic chips vs FPGA
Well, if you mean by "screw machine" a machine that makes screws, well, generally they literally stamp fasteners from spools of metal wire. Much faster and more efficient than trying to machine such parts ... that would be hideously slow in comparison.
Not a stamper. Think of a metal lathe, then porcupine it with multiple cutting tools and power feeds, to get a turret lathe. Then add even more clockwork/gearing and it can make multiple parts pretty much hands off, and you got a screw machine.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screw_machine
All that clockwork/gearing is complicated as heck to modify compared to feeding a new gcode file into a CNC. However, being hyper-specialized, if you don't need a slow precisely controlled negative X-axis movement or whatever, a screw machine probably has a big ole high tension spring that moves "instantly" vs the CNC slowly methodically and precisely crawling neg x-axis.
As far as hideously slow, you'd be surprised even in ancient history what a couple horsepower and sharp cutting/forming tools can do...