Chris Foot

The Perils of the IT Profession One of the common challenges that all technicians face, no matter what area of IT they work in, is the absolute attention to detail our profession demands. Switch a couple of characters in a script, forget to set your SID, set the wrong flag at the wrong time and [...]

We have learned in previous blogs that identifying what our customers expect from us is an absolute requirement in meeting their needs.   We probably won’t be meeting all of our customer’s expectations if we don’t have a firm understanding of what they are. We also know that each organization, group and individual user has their own [...]

Processing Customer Feedback It is important to note that the alignment engine is a continuous process.  It is iterative by nature.   There is no set time table that is used to process and analyze the collected data.   Customer feedback data is continuously analyzed by the personnel who service the account and by Service Assurance team [...]

One of the key measurements that we can use to evaluate service delivery performance is customer feedback.  We feel so strongly about customer feedback at Remote DBA Experts that we have created a customer feedback strategy called “The Service Delivery Alignment Engine.” We have established multiple communication flows to ensure that we receive feedback from [...]

In this post, we will continue our discussion on effective communication skills and the role they play in our careers. This two-part blog entry is a somewhat lighthearted look at my own life’s lessons on effective communications (or lack thereof).   In future posts, we’ll look at different mechanisms we can use to communicate and coordinate [...]

As we all know, effective verbal and written communication is critical to the success of any business activity.   The more complex the activity or the more coordination that is required to complete a given task, the more important effective communications becomes.    There are very few tasks in the DBA profession that don’t require some level of coordination between [...]

As we learned in my last post, effective measurements are required to judge the success of any activity.  The blog also contained some recommendations on questions to ask your customers in order to determine if you are delivering high quality service.     After the responses are received, the customer feedback data needs to be evaluated quickly [...]

As we learned from my last post, it takes much more than technical skills to become successful as a database administrator.  One of the key measurements DBAs can use to evaluate their performance is customer feedback.  We feel so strongly about customer feedback at Remote DBA Experts that we have created a customer feedback strategy [...]

Let’s deviate from tuning for a couple of weeks.   I’d like to turn our attention to a topic that I have lightly covered in the past.   It is the premise that it takes more than just being a great technician to keep DBA customers happy.  There are dozens of database “experts” out there that are [...]

Let’s deviate from our technical topics for a blog or two.     As database administrators, it is important for us to know what educational topics we should be spending our most precious resource on.   That resource is our time.   When it comes to tuning education, what should we be learning?    Where should we be spending our time?    [...]