As I mentioned in my last post, our key capabilities at Remote DBA Experts are those that support our ability to be most proactive, responsive and effective.  Let me now expand upon each of the key capabilities.

Proactiveness Capabilities

Proactiveness is first and foremost an attitude. Thus, it comes from people and it starts with them.  That means we must look for this attitude in our recruiting and hiring process.  We hire individuals who are technically capable and meet many other criteria (see our hiring criterion here).  That is where it all starts.  Furthermore, we provide the individual with the ability to be most proactive by enabling proactivity with key capabilities.  In the case of Proactiveness, our primary aim is internal and customer problem prevention.

In order to be most efficient and effective at problem prevention, we focus our attention and investment on the key capability components:

• Key Information
• Key Processes
• Key Skills
• Key Sub Capabilities
• Key Tools
• Other

The first step is to identify these key items and then to ensure they are in place and available to the team.  This is where we focus our optimization efforts.

Here at Remote DBA Experts, our monitoring capability is the primary tool that enables us to predict and prevent problems and we place significant effort to that end.  In fact, this year we invested a lot of money and attention to this capability.  We have also established a new internal organization that is completely focused on problem prevention and customer responsiveness.  It is working out to be one of our best ideas ever!

Responsiveness Capabilities

Like Proactiveness, Responsiveness is also an attitude we look for in the folks we recruit and hire. In this area we have also made significant efforts and investments recently to enhance this capability.  We implemented a new CRM that is the key to improving and maintaining our ability to respond to our customers both internal and external.

Responsiveness involves four key aspects:

• Acknowledging
• Timely Action
• Updating
• Closure

Our Responsiveness Capabilities are focused on enabling these aspects. This ensures that we acknowledge customer requests quickly, take timely action, keep the customer informed along the way, and close the matter to the satisfaction of the customer.

Effectiveness Capabilities

For Remote DBA Experts, Effectiveness means accomplishing two primary things for our customers: Ensure the highest database environment availability and performance possible. That is it!  That is what being effective means to our team.

Our Effectiveness Capabilities focus on two areas: Activities and Tasks.

Activities

Activities are what I call the set of “meta-activities” people must do effectively in order to accomplish value delivering tasks and achieve the key results customer expect.  Effectively completing them is part of the sequence.

• Effective Preparation
• Effective Learning
• Effective Communication
• Effective Documentation
• Effective Search
• Effective Analysis
• Effective Collaboration
• Effective Research

To execute these activities most effectively, you need to clearly define each.  You need to know and understand what Effectiveness means for every one of them.  You need to know which of them are more vital to the end result.  Spending too much time and/or effort on less vital activities will affect their proverbial strength as a link in the chain.

Tasks

Tasks are what customers hire us to do for them.  Each of these tasks breaks down into many more “sub-tasks” for the lack of a better term.  However, the three tasks listed below capture the essence of the services we deliver.  Their effective completion is the ultimate contributor to us being most effective as a whole.  Database availability and performance directly depend on how well we proactively monitor and maintain the databases under our stewardship.  Furthermore, effectively preventing and resolving problems enhances our effectiveness.

• Effective Database Monitoring
• Effective Problem Management (prevention and resolution)
• Effective Database Maintenance

I hope this post gives you a better sense of our Key capabilities and how we go about them.  In my next post, I will delve into the Capability Maturity subject.  Thanks for reading!

The BEST is Yet to Come!

Epi Torres, CEO

Recently I ran into an issue where I had a SQL Server instance that needed to have a database restored on it.  A pretty simple task, right?  Well, it turns out that I did not have rights on the system to do the restore.  My client did not have a system administrator password and did not have a user which we could use to grant us the necessary access.  But, I did have local system administrator privileges on the server.  As long as we have local admin rights on the server we can get the necessary privileges from SQL Server.

1. The first step to recovery is having the ability to bring the instance down.  We can do this a few different ways: either through Enterprise Manager (SQL Server Management Studio), services, or through Configuration Manager.  Once the instance is brought down we need to bring it up in single user mode using the ‘m’ flag.  I usually do this through the command prompt using ‘net start’ or you could put the trace flag in the startup parameter files; however you feel most comfortable.  Example: Bringing the default instance down and starting it back up in single user mode.



2. Use SQLCMD (2005-2008) or iSQL (2000) to connect to the instance.  Make sure that Object Explorer and applications are not connected to the instance.  You can also do this through SSMS or Query Analyzer. Example: Connect to the instance once in single user mode.



3. Add yourself as a user and grant yourself administrator privileges. Example: Adding a test user and giving it system administrator privileges.



4. Congratulations!  You have successfully given yourself administrator privileges, so now stop SQL Server and start it back up without the single user flag.

Tim Foley, Sr. SQL Server DBA

At Remote DBA Experts, we are constantly optimizing our key service capabilities.  We monitor the maturity and performance of all our key capabilities and ensure our efforts are ongoing to enable the best performance of those capabilities.  In the following series of posts, I will describe our model and approach to optimization.

To get started, I will define the following terms so we are on the same page during the rest of the posts in the series:

• Key Capabilities
• Capability Maturity
• Optimization
• Model

Key Capabilities

Capability is defined as the quality or ability of being capable.  A key capability is a mission-critical capability.  In our case, we have identified several key capabilities for our remote database administration services business.  Our mission is to deliver better and more service than in-house DBAs.  In order to accomplish our mission, we focus our effort on three main areas:

• Proactiveness
• Responsiveness
• Effectiveness

Hence, our Key Capabilities are all the things that enable us to be the most proactive, responsive and effective in delivering our remote DBA services.

Capability Maturity

Capability Maturity is simply the level of development and performance of the capability.  It involves three main aspects:

• Approach: The approach or strategy you take to make it happen
• Implementation: How well you implement it
• Results:  What results are produced by the capability

Optimization

This is the process of continuous improvement.  It means setting goals, objectives, and metrics for assessing performance and  taking action to optimize the capability based on how it performs.

The Model

The model we use to frame our key capabilities is simple and straightforward.  It includes five components we believe are critical to a capability’s performance:

• Information
• Processes
• Skills
• Sub-Capabilities: methods, tools, systems, etc.
• Other: control parameters, attitudes, etc.

In the following posts, I will delve into each of these and expand upon them with more detail and examples.  I hope you come back to read the series.

The BEST is Yet to Come!

Epi Torres, CEO

As Maximizers, leaders are responsible for getting the most and best out of the human, physical and economic resources under their stewardship.  This is another critical aspect of leadership.  Nothing can kill a business like underutilized assets.  Leaders are responsible to monitor and manage this closely.  They need to place close attention to the maximization of all resources.

Leaders are responsible for three fundamental types of assets:

• Human: People
• Physical: Plant, equipment, and capabilities
• Financial: Balance sheet and income statement items

To be the most effective and efficient in this role, leaders need to set up goals and strategies to get the most and best out of their resources.

Getting the most and best out of human resources

In a book I read a while ago, The Breakthrough Company, Keith McFarland identifies strategies and skills that enable everyday companies to become extraordinary performers. According to his research, key managers in “breakthrough” companies have the ability to move away from spending time doing tasks and focus on spending time in three critical areas: Strategy, people and execution.

In the People area, the idea is to spend more time on activities that ensure you are getting the most out of your people. This does not mean “slave driving” or “watching over shoulders.” It means spending time finding out what makes people tick, challenging them, catching them doing good things and bad, and providing productive feedback to make sure they are engaged and aligned with your company’s mission.

Getting the most and best out of physical resources

Companies make significant investments in plants, equipment and capabilities critical to business operations.  Leaders must not only ensure these investments are made wisely during the pre-acquisition phase, but they must also ensure they are implemented, maintained, and fully utilized afterwards.

Underutilized space, capacity, features and functions must be identified and managed constantly.

Getting the most and best out of financial resources

Finally, leaders must keep an eye on the financial resources under their stewardship.  They need to make sure that they are making the best use of the cash they have on hand. They also need to ensure that collections remain in check, they have the best ratios (debt/equity, etc.) given their industry, budgets are under control, and loans are structured properly given the market conditions.

Maximizing is the final role in this series.  Leaders must be constantly vigilant of these four roles and the tasks thereof in order to be most effective in their position.  Depending on their level and the size of their organization, these roles change accordingly. Nevertheless, they are all critical to your success.  Structuring your agendas accordingly will enable you to fulfill them and accomplish your responsibilities as a leader much better.

The BEST is Yet to Come!

Epi Torres, CEO

As Actualizers, leaders are responsible for ensuring the execution of the developed strategies and ensuing plans and tasks.  No ideas or strategies will come to fruition without making sure things happen.  Leaders must be vigilant of execution.  They need to make sure they and others follow-through as planned.  Many great ideas fall through the cracks and many strategies remain on paper because leaders fail to ensure execution.

What does Actualizing mean?

Actualizing means both getting things done and making sure things happen.  It is both a personal and a leadership activity. Actualizing is making sure that the key responsibilities of your role as a leader get executed.  When you do, you can lead by example.  If you do not do what you are supposed to do, you will have less integrity to ask others to do their part.

What is the Actualizing challenge?

Chuck Martin and his colleagues, Dr. Guare and Dr. Dawson, recently published their latest book, Work Your Strengths.  This book is based on the results of a two-year study of 2500 individuals in hundreds of American corporations both large and small.  The study was designed to help identify the strongest and weakest of 12 executive skills that Martin and his team identified in their previous book, Smarts.  This book is fantastic — A must read!  One of most interesting findings relevant to this post is the fact that “Task Initiation” came out as a common weakness across all categories of the studied subjects.  Employees, Managers, Directors, EVP/SVP, and C-level folks all have this as a weakness.  In a nut shell, it seems that we are all procrastinators.  Thus, actualization is a big challenge.

I also read recently that a VERY small percentage of strategic initiatives are actually seen to fruition in corporate America.

If all this is true, leaders who find ways to get things done and to make them happen across their organization may have a competitive advantage!

What does Actualizing entail?

Actualizing entails identification, prioritization and organization of critical role responsibilities, tasks, and action items for self and others.  In the context of this post, I will focus on actualizing the things that will make the biggest impact on accomplishing your aims.  Aim Accomplishment Strategies produce action plans that contain the action items necessary to get your aim accomplished.  To actualize your aim, you must make sure the plan is executed.  Everyone who has to take action needs to be held accountable for their part of the plan.  Very often, aim strategies and related plans are developed and launched, but mechanisms to ensure execution are not put in place to track progress. People then get distracted or busy and fail to follow-through, or they do so off schedule.   Leaders must set a process to ensure execution.  There are several mechanisms to help do this.  Regular meetings and reports are most commonly used. There are a number of software packages that can also be used to track project and schedule progress.

Lack of good follow-up and accountability can kill accomplishment.  When people do not do what they committed to do per plan, there probably was a failure in one of the early-on activity stages.  People who did not get the importance of the aim, strategy or action items will have less impetus to do what they are supposed to do.  People who were not energized or lost their “energy” somehow, will also lose their impetus.  Lastly, if people were not properly enabled with resources or capabilities, they will also have a harder time following-through.  One of my tendencies is to set out too many things to accomplish at the same time.  This tends to confuse people and causes poor follow-through as well. Lack of clarity can be a constraint to accomplishment.  I try hard to use the vital few (80/20) principle to keep me and my team from trying too much at once.  It helps!

When things are not getting done, look first at the early-on stages and make sure people are aligned, engaged and enabled.  If they are, look at the mechanisms in place (or missing) to track progress and hold them accountable.  My experience has been that fully aligned, energized, and enabled people need little prodding to do what they are supposed to do.  That is the power of clarity, motivational force, and enablers!  Keep an eye on them and you won’t need a big hammer to get things to happen.

To be more effective in this critical role, leaders must develop an action bias and effective approaches to ensure execution from self and others.

The BEST is Yet to Come!

Epi Torres, CEO

As Strategizers, leaders are responsible for developing strategies to accomplish what they conceptualized.  Once leaders conceptualize, they need to develop ways to get from ideas to results.  Strategies provide approaches to ensure that a vision becomes a reality or that a product or service idea becomes a reality in order to produce revenue and profits.  Strategizing is critical to leaders!

What is Strategy?

Strategy is the approach you take to accomplish an aim. It is a series of actions and decisions designed to achieve a particular objective, expectation or goal. The purpose of a strategy is to guide you to accomplishment. Strategizing is the process of planning or choosing a strategy. Strategies are dynamic, rarely static. According to the results of his five-year study of over 7,000 companies, Keith McFarland, author of The Breakthrough Company, discovered that leaders of such companies spend a significant amount of time engaged in strategizing. He uncovered that it was the top activity these leaders engaged in day in and day out.

What Does Strategizing Entail?

As a process, strategizing involves multiple aspects:

• Crafting, or creating strategy
• Adopting, or implementing strategy
• Adjusting, or modifying strategy

On a daily basis, leaders are involved with multiple strategies devised to accomplish multiple aims. Because strategizing is such a dynamic process, leaders find themselves involved in a multitude of strategic efforts on a regular basis. They are constantly crafting, adopting, or adjusting strategies for their multiple aims. Furthermore, depending on the strategy’s level (organizational, departmental, or personal/individual) being worked on, others must be involved. This makes strategizing a very interesting, and sometimes complex, process that needs to be carefully orchestrated. The “classic” strategic framework, regardless of level, is fairly straight forward and involves seeking the answer to a few basic questions:

• What needs to be done?
• Why does it need to get done?
• Who needs to do what?
• When does it need to be done by?
• How does it (best) get done?

Many variables need to be considered based on the level of strategy, and on the impact and consequences it will have. The most important aspect to keep in mind is that the process is usually more important than the outcome itself. Strategies are rarely carved in concrete. It is rare to accomplish an aim with the exact strategy that was devised at the onset. Much can, and does change. Strategies need to be flexible. That is where the adapting aspect comes in and leaders need to spend time adjusting strategies to adapt to changing conditions and circumstances.

Strategy forces us to think critically. It requires that we stop, look, and listen. It requires asking and responding to questions. It requires the involvement of as many as possible and as practical. At the business strategic plan level, there are markets, competitors, employees, products, services, prices, economics, etc. Strategizing time is powerful time. That is why “Breakthrough” leaders spend so much time on strategies; both big and small, simple and complex. They are always crafting, adopting, or adapting some strategy at some level.

I hope this post gave you a better sense for this critical leadership role.  The strategizer role is critical if you want to make what you create as a conceptualizer a reality.

The BEST is Yet to Come!

Epi Torres, CEO

As I mentioned in my last post, there are four critical leadership roles:

• Conceptualizer
• Strategizer
• Actualizer
• Maximizer

In this post, I will delve into the first role: Conceptualizer.

As Conceptualizers, leaders are responsible for crafting ideas, visions, goals and objectives for their organizations.   They must be creating constantly.  Business is very dynamic and requires constant flows of ideas in order to survive our challenging environment.  Things are always changing and business must adapt quickly. It is the leader’s primary responsibility to ensure the conceptualization of the aforementioned items.

Leadership is all about making things happen!  To make something happen, you must first conceptualize it by forming a clear image of it in your mind or on paper. Conceptualizing is about developing, conceiving, creating, crafting, or devising things such as:

• Ideas
• Solutions
• Decisions

Let’s delve into idea conceptualization.  Ideas are the life of business.    Without ideas, business would not exist!  Ideas give birth to businesses and keep them alive and thriving.  Creative business ideas are hard to come by.  There are several categories for business ideas:

• Growth ideas
• Profit ideas
• Other ideas

I have devised a four phase approach to idea conceptualization that leaders can use to help them ideate.  These phases apply to any of the categories above.

Phase 1: Framing

Framing provides context for the idea. The purpose of this process is to ensure the effort to generate ideas is efficient and effective.  The goal is to ensure ideas are generated in the context of the business goals and objectives as well as its environment.  The framing process requires certain inputs, takes a number of prescribed steps, and produces an output that feeds the next phase: Idea generation.

Phase 2: Idea Generation

Idea generation is the phase where you come up with a number of ideas regardless of anything.  Whatever comes to mind goes within the frame set in Phase 1.  Think and list whatever comes up.  Let the storm brew in your brain and gather any and all thoughts.  Quantity not quality is the goal at this stage.

Phase 3: Idea Evaluation

In this phase you take the list of ideas previously generated and you take a careful look at it.  There are many ways to sort through them.  You can use affinity diagrams to find common themes or you can look for similar ideas and combine them.  Once you have the list down to a manageable level, you need some criteria to evaluate them.

Phase 4: Idea Selection

Using the criterion you developed, go about choosing the most applicable ideas given your goal.  Ultimately, some gut feelings will come into play as you go about making the final selection.  Obviously, involving others in these processes can always add to the probability of success.

In the case of a growth idea, there are many approaches to grow your business:

• New, improved, or expanded products and/or services
• New, improved, or expanded processes
• New, improved, or expanded methods
• New, improved, or expanded markets
• New, improved, or expanded channels
• Etc.

As you can see, it can get complicated.  Having a well-planned process available to help you can make this a very effective and efficient endeavor.  Give it a try!

In my next post, I will delve into the next leadership role: Strategizer.  It is not enough to have great ideas.  Leaders must make them happen.  The next step to get ideas from paper to reality is to develop a strategy.  That’s what I will focus on in my upcoming post.

The BEST is Yet to Come!

Epi Torres, CEO

In my next blog series, I will explore four key roles that leaders play in business:

• Conceptualizer
• Strategizer
• Actualizer
• Maximizer

When you boil it down, these four roles capture the essence of leadership.  Leaders in all realms of leadership spend a great deal of time doing things that fit one of these four areas:

Conceptualizing

As Conceptualizers, they are responsible for crafting ideas, visions, goals and objectives for their organizations.   Leaders must be creating constantly.  Business is very dynamic and requires constant flows of ideas in order to survive our challenging environment.  Things are always changing and business must adapt quickly. It is the leader’s primary responsibility to ensure the conceptualization of the aforementioned items.

Strategizing

As Strategizers, they are responsible for developing strategies to accomplish what they conceptualized.  Once leaders conceptualize, they need to develop ways to get from ideas to results.  Strategies provide approaches to ensure that a vision becomes a reality or  that a product or service idea becomes a reality in order to produce revenue and profits.  Strategizing is critical to leaders!

Actualizing

As Actualizers, they are responsible for ensuring the execution of the developed strategies and ensuing plans and tasks.  No ideas or strategies will come to fruition without making sure things happen.  Leaders must be vigilant of execution.  They need to make sure they and others follow-through as planned.  Many great ideas fall through the cracks and many strategies remain on paper because leaders fail to ensure execution.

Maximizing

As Maximizers, they are responsible for getting the most and best out of the human, physical and economic resources under their stewardship.  This is another critical aspect of leadership.  Nothing can kill a business like underutilized assets.  Leaders are responsible to monitor and manage this closely.  They need to place close attention to the maximization of all resources.

In my next post, I will explore each of the four roles in more depth.  I hope you will read them and find them useful.

The BEST is Yet to Come!

Epi Torres, CEO

As a DBA who services numerous customers and clients, an issue that crops up relatively often is the need for more disk space. As an organization you do have options:

1. Trim your data
2. Buy new disks
3. Truncate your data (Yeah right!!)

For most organizations these are truly not options at all. With the release of SQL Server 2008, one feature that can immediately address this concern with minimal side effects is backup compression. Here are some stats collected against the adventureworks database:

Uncompressed

Processed 23016 pages for database ‘AdventureWorks2008′,
file ‘AdventureWorks2008_Data’ on file 1.

Processed 36 pages for database ‘AdventureWorks2008′,
file ‘FileStreamDocuments’ on file 1.

Processed 1 pages for database ‘AdventureWorks2008′,
file ‘AdventureWorks2008_Log’ on file 1.

100 percent processed.

BACKUP DATABASE successfully processed 23053 pages in 10.842 seconds (16.610 MB/sec).

Compressed

Processed 23016 pages for database ‘AdventureWorks2008′,
file ‘AdventureWorks2008_Data’ on file 1.

Processed 36 pages for database ‘AdventureWorks2008′,
file ‘FileStreamDocuments’ on file 1.

Processed 2 pages for database ‘AdventureWorks2008′,
file ‘AdventureWorks2008_Log’ on file 1.

100 percent processed.

BACKUP DATABASE successfully processed 23054 pages in 5.975 seconds (30.142 MB/sec).

The compressed backup took 4 seconds less and was 75% smaller.

Think about the potential gain once this technology is applied to vldb (very large databases). There is an extreme amount of potential savings in disk space just by utilizing backup compression. With the release of SQL Server 2008 R2, not only are these features available in the Enterprise Edition but these features are also available in Standard Edition.

Thanks,

James Shropshire MCDBA, MCITP SQL Server

Motivation influences how we make decisions.    According to the expectancy theory proposed by Victor Vroom, employees in an organization are the most motivated when they think an effort will result in better performance, and that better performance can lead to rewards they value.  Based on the same theory, Professor Richard W. Scholl of the University of Rhode Island poses that motivational force accomplishes three things:

• Energizes behavior
• Directs behavior
• Sustains behavior

Let’s explore each of them.

Energizing behavior

Motivational force gets us going.  It gives us impetus to take on an effort. It provides energy to sustain the effort and overcome the challenges and obstacles that always come with worthwhile endeavors.

Directing behavior

It directs our attention towards the things we believe are necessary to accomplish what we set out to do.  It informs our judgment to help make decisions that will be consistent with the aim.

Sustaining behavior

It helps us keep up with whatever we have to do to accomplish our aim or commitment.  It provides oxygen to our persistence and perseverance muscles.

The following diagram, developed by Professor Scholl, depicts motivational force in an equations format.  It further defines and explains the concept:  Motivation = Valence x Expectancy(Instrumentality). This means that motivational force is the product of our perception of the chances or probability that an effort will produce valuable results times the probability that the outcome of our efforts will lead to expected reward times the value we place on the expected reward.

Here are three questions I developed to inform my own decisions and to assess others’ motivation towards assignments and responsibilities assigned to them.

• Can I/you get it done?
• What will I/you get from doing it?
• How important is what I/you will get for me/you?

If you find yourself or others not fully engaged in something, use these questions to explore motivational forces and decision-making approaches affecting job performances.

There are many more motivation theories.  I have found this one to be the most useful at work.  I hope it works for you too.

The BEST is Yet to Come!

Epi Torres, CEO