This post is dedicated to the subject of blunders.  Since this is a post about how we decide, I will delve into a number of reasons why we make mistakes or blunders.  In preparation for this blog series on decision-making, I read a few articles and books.  One of them was a book written by Zachary Shore titled Blunder.  In his book, he identifies seven reasons why smart people make blunders.  A blunder is defined as a stupid, careless, or thoughtless mistake.  Let’s explore a few of these reasons.

Fear of being seen as weak

Many decisions we make are made out of fear of being perceived by others as a weak person. Depending on the meaning “being weak” has to a person and the implications they attach to such perception by others can lead to distorted judgment and “good” blunders.

Thinking others think like we do

This is probably a very common issue for many of us.  The truth is every human sees things differently.  We filter stimuli, the things we see, hear, etc. according to our own map of the world.  Our map develops from our experiences.  While we can agree and reach common ground, the meaning, value or importance we give to things are different.  Assuming others see, hear, and more importantly, understand the same is highly unlikely.

Confusing causes of complex events

According to one of the laws of Peter Senge’s The Fifth Discipline, “Cause and effect are not closely related in time and space. There is a fundamental mismatch between the nature of reality in complex systems and our predominant ways of thinking about that reality.  The first step in correcting that mismatch is to let go of the notion that cause and effect are close in time and space.”  We must be keenly aware of this fact.  When we make decisions based on false assumptions regarding its cause, the solutions we choose will ultimately not solve the problem or prevent it from recurrence.

In order to prevent blunders, we must become as present as possible to reality and avoid our habitual thinking pattern from interfering with the decision process.

As I suggested in my last post, making a list of these blunder drivers can help you remember the possibility that one or more of these can get in the way of the best decision.  It may save you from some unnecessary pain and sorrow later.

The BEST is Yet to Come!

Epi Torres, CEO

In this post, I will continue my discussion on how we make decisions.  I will specifically focus on a mechanism the human brain devised to help us deal with decision-making.  According to the Wikipedia definition, cognitive bias is a human tendency to draw incorrect conclusions in certain circumstances based on cognitive factors rather than evidence.

Biases can emerge from several mental processes.  However, I believe that these biases are easy ways out for us to cope with the sometime difficult process of making decisions.  Similar to the way we delete, distort and generalize the information received by our senses, biases may be a way for our mind to short-cut the decision process.  We have to make so many decisions so often that it can be overwhelming.  The lazy brain facilitates this by enabling us to bypass the difficult process substituting thoughts for facts or reality.

The following list includes some of the most commonly used biases.  The idea is to keep a few of them in mind when making critical decisions that may be better done with facts or based on reality as opposed to one or more of these so called biases.  This particular list includes biases that are commonly applied in business judgment scenarios.

• Avoiding options for which missing information makes the probability seem unknown.
• Relying too heavily on a single piece of information or past experience when making decisions.
• Neglecting relevant data when discerning correlations or associations.
• Valuing something based on the opinion of someone who is seen as an authority on the topic.
• Estimating what is more likely by what is more available in recent memory.
• Seeing patterns where no patterns exist.
• Believing that the closer the average performance is to a target, the tighter the distribution of the data set.
• Assuming that specific conditions are more probable than general ones.
• Selling assets that have increased in value but hold assets that have decreased in value.
• Thinking that future probabilities are altered by past events, when in reality they are unchanged.
• Performing differently when we know we are being observed.
• Seeing past events as being predictable.
• Supposing a relationship between a certain type of action and an effect.
• Believing that someone must know what is going on.
• Neglecting known odds when reevaluating odds in light of weak evidence.
• Expecting a given result and unconsciously manipulating an experiment or misinterpreting data in order to get it.
• Being over-optimistic about the outcome of planned actions.
• Ignoring an obvious negative situation.
• Overestimating the probability of good things happening to them.
• Perceiving vague images or sounds as real, significant, or important.
• Weighing initial events more than subsequent ones.
• Weighing recent events more than earlier events.
• Expecting extreme performance to continue.
• Distorting evidence or data by the way data is collected.
• Expecting a member of a group to have certain characteristics without having actual information about that individual.
• Judging probability of the whole to be less than the probabilities of the parts.
• Perceiving something to be true if beliefs demand it to be true.
• Concentrating on the people or things that survived some process and ignoring those that didn’t.
• Arguing that a strategy is effective given the winners, while ignoring the large number of losers.
• Believing that recent events appear to have occurred more remotely and remote events appear to have occurred more recently.
• Selecting or adjusting a hypothesis after the data is collected, thus making it impossible to test the hypothesis fairly.

This list is by no means a comprehensive one.  I suggest you do more research to learn additional biases.  Ultimately, we all fall prey to these and many more biases.  Accepting that we may do so and paying close attention to other’s and our own decisions can help us avoid making poor decisions due to one or two of these biases.  Create a list of those you may be most prone to and keep it handy to use a checklist for critical personal or business decisions.  Doing so can go a long way in improving your and other’s judgment.

The BEST is Yet to Come!

Epi Torres, CEO

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 the end result usually isn’t very pretty. Many commands we issue on a regular basis are destructive by their very nature.

If you never make mistakes, send me a resume. I’m always looking for a “Patron Saint of IT” here at Remote DBA Experts. It will also save us on travel costs because I’m sure you’ll be able to spread your wings and fly here on your own.

Then there’s the software glitches. The problems that pop up out of the blue and make you go:

“WHAT THE? – How did THAT happen? I’ve done this 317 times in a row and it worked every time.”

For you math majors, here’s my calculation for one of the Foot Principles of IT Support:

CLOSER YOU ARE TO PRODUCTION TURNOVER

+ THE GREATER THE VISIBILITY OF THE PROJECT

= THE MORE LIKELY A PREVIOUSLY UNKNOWN SOFTWARE GLITCH WILL OCCUR

I don’t care what software you are using, you will run into the “only occurs on this release, on this version of the operating system, using this particular feature on the third Tuesday of the sixth month when it’s cloudy outside” BUG. Be sure to expect management to stop by and ask “well, why didn’t you test this on the third Tuesday of the sixth month when it was cloudy outside?”

Finally, there are the hardware problems that we have all come so accustomed to and fond of.   It’s that triple redundant, super fault tolerant, titanium based, twice-the-price component that you just got management to sign off on a few months ago.    The one that your hardware vendor assured you would solve all of your performance and availability problems.   The component they described as “state-of the art and self healing”.  Fixes itself, they said.

The one that forced you to create that 15 page justification document with all the pretty charts and graphs stating that this piece of hardware will still be running in the year 2040.   The component that just decided to flake out and take down your entire online, 10-thousand dollar a minute web-based ordering system.  You then call the vendor and they say “yeah, we’ve heard about that happening occasionally – we thought we got that fixed.”

Root Cause Corrective Action Reports

A customer that is affected by an application outage or slowdown needs to have a firm understating on  what caused the problem, the activities performed to correct the problem and the action items that will be undertaken to mitigate or prevent the problem from occurring again.

The Root Cause Corrective Action Document provides information on the underlying causal factors that generated the problem and a timeline of events that occurred during the problem event. This ensures that all problems are properly analyzed and that all steps are taken to prevent future occurrences.  This is a key component of our problem resolution strategy in addition to obtaining customer feedback on the quality of our problem resolution capabilities.

I can’t stress the importance of using some form of problem notification document.   A customer that is unsure of “what happened” is going to an unhappy customer.   Giving your customer a clear picture of the problem event and the steps you will take to prevent the problem’s reoccurrence  shows them that the quality of their environments is IMPORTANT TO YOU and you do NOT TAKE PROBLEMS LIGHTLY.    The time you spend crafting the Root Cause Correction Action Document will pay big dividends in customer happiness.

The Root Cause Correction Action Document’s components are fairly simple.   Here’s a brief description of each of the sections:

Heading

The heading section contains the customer name, document date, numeric document identifier, the date the problem occurred and the person preparing the document.

Problem Definition

A clear, concise definition of the exact problem.   You need to remember that not everyone reading your document will have a technical background.   Leave the technical mumbo-jumbo out of it.   You are trying to inform your customer of the event NOT confuse them.

Business Impact

What was the impact on their business?  Don’t sugar coat it.   Tell them that the failure caused a 14 hour outage on their production ERP system.   The business impact of the example shown below would be “A 37 minute delay occurred in replication between server ORAPGH and DB2DEL.  During this time DB2DEL reports did not provide current data.”

Event Timelines

This is a chronological timeline of the events that led to the problem (if you know what they are), and the steps that were taken to correct the issue.  Include every step that occurred up to and including verifying that the fixed system was indeed operational.   Here’s an example:

Wednesday May 5, 2010

18:08    Remote DBA Experts’ log monitor for the replication engine determined that replication was not successfully occurring between the two production platforms (ORAPGH and DB2DEL)

18:10     Remote DBA Experts notifies Delaware business units that data replication has stopped and reports being generated will not be current.

18:15     As a recommended action previously provided by the software vendor, Remote DBA Experts stopped and started the replication engine on both platforms.

18:30    Remote DBA Experts verified that the replication engine was running and restarts replication processes.

18:45     Remote DBA Experts verifies that replication was successfully occurring between ORAPGH and DB2DEL.

18:47     Remote DBA Experts begins monitoring the delay to determine the length of time it will take the replication engine to resynchronize the data between ORAPGH and DB2DEL.  Delay estimation is calculated to be 15 minutes.

19:00    Monitors show that both environments are synchronized.

19:05    Remote DBA Experts notifies Delaware business units that replication is occurring and all data is current.

19:10    Logs and trace files are collected and a Severity One problem is initiated with software vendor.

Thursday May 6, 2010

07:00   Software vendor contacts Remote DBA Experts support personnel.  States that problem was caused by a previously unidentified software bug.  Recommends upgrading product to newest release (we’ve never heard that one before).

Problem Root Cause

The underlying causal factor that created the problem event.  In the case above, the root cause was due to a software code issue that caused replication to terminate abnormally.

Contributing Factors

There are times when the problem is exacerbated by contributing factors.  In our example, if a long running job prevented us from successfully stopping the replication engine (leading to a longer outage), we would include a description of that issue in this section.

Resolution

This section contains the actual steps that were taken to correct the problem.   It does not restate the steps in chronological order.   It is a brief description of the activities taken to correct the issue.

Future Prevention

The Future Prevention Section is the most important component of the Root Cause Corrective Action document.  This section provides the steps that you will take as a service provider to ensure that the problem does not reoccur.    It contains a list of action items, the person responsible for completing that action item and a date the action item will be complete.

Signature Section

Signed by the technicians involved with the problem and a member of the service provider management team.

The Importance of Following Up
If you have been reading my previous blogs, you know that we feel so strongly about customer feedback at Remote DBA Experts that we have created a customer feedback strategy called “The Customer Feedback Engine.” We have established multiple communication flows to ensure that we receive feedback from all of the personnel that we support including management, DBAs, developers and end-users.

One of the key strategies is the role our Service Assurance Manager plays.  Remote DBA Experts’ Service Assurance Manager contacts all customers when a problem occurs.  Whether or not we caused the problem is immaterial.  We feel that is our responsibility as a service provider to let our customers know that their application’s performance and availability is important to us.

As my old boss Dan Pizzica used to tell me (when I was a VERY junior technician) “It really doesn’t make a difference who or what broke YOUR database (strong emphasis on the word YOUR). You are the technician who is ultimately responsible for fixing it. The buck stops with you. If you can’t protect your environments, you aren’t doing your job.” We all know he’s absolutely correct.

Wrap-up
It was not the intent of this blog to coerce readers into using the Root Cause Corrective Action information we provide to customers here at Remote DBA Experts verbatim.  It was to promote the benefits that a structured, well thought out problem notification document provides to all of us who are responsible for keeping our customer’s environments highly available and high performance.

Thanks for Reading,

Chris Foot
Oracle Ace
Director Of Service Delivery

In my prior posts on the decision-making process, I described why decisions are made, what types of decisions we make, and when we make decisions.  In this post, I will delve into my theory of how decisions come to be.

A Few Points

Before I get into the nitty-gritty of the decision-making process, let me make a few points:

1. The geneses of all decisions are unmet needs.  That is where it all starts for us humans, according to my understanding of Maslow’s theory.  Unconsciously, our unmet needs influence and drive our decision-making process. I will explain more about this later on.
2. The quality of decisions we make depends on a number of factors:
   • The process followed
   • The time and effort spent
   • The drivers
   • The quantity and amount of information used
3. The “stickiness” of effortful decisions depends, in great part, on the amount of effort spent, confidence given, and importance placed on the decision-making process used to arrive at a decision.
4. Meaning plays a significant role in decision-making.
5. Our personality and our state of mind affect our decisions significantly.

The Process

Our senses (our skin, our ears, our eyes, our nose, and our mouth) receive millions of bits of information at every moment from the time we arrive into this very busy world.  In order to help us cope and make some sense of all the input available, we quickly learn to filter some of that information being bombarded by our environment though our senses.  The mechanisms we use to do that are known as our perceptual filters.  There are three of them:

• Deletions
• Distortions
• Generalizations

We delete information we deem not important at the moment of input.  Our attention and concerns at any given moment dictate what we chose to take in or reject. We distort information to best fit our world-view, or the way we see things as driven by our understandings, values and beliefs. And we generalize or draw conclusions based on just a few experiences or bytes of information.

This filtering process enables us to cope and make sense of the vast amount of data out there.  These filters enable us to represent what happens in our mind and to store it in our memory banks.  We represent things or categorize them in many ways:  Right, wrong, good or bad, ugly or beautiful, fun or boring, etc. These representations also provoke associated emotions or feelings that get stored with them and influence how we recall them.  This process is part of our meaning making process.  What things mean to us emanates from our representation process.  Now let’s see how the decision-making process works.

I will explore the process in the context of the most basic decision we make:  What to do now.

When you think about it,  no decision is more critical.  Some claim there is only “now.” What we do or don’t do “now” determines what happens later.  It is the only effort that really matters.

One theory is that our decisions are driven by the compulsions associated with our temperament or personality profile.  According to the Enneagram theory, there are nine such profiles or types.

1. Type One is driven to be perfect.
2. Type Two is driven to be helpful.
3. Type Three is driven to be successful.
4. Type Four is driven to be unique.
5. Type Five is driven to be knowledgeable.
6. Type Six is driven to be secure.
7. Type Seven is driven to be happy.
8. Type Eight is driven to be strong.
9. Type Nine is driven to be in harmony.

These compulsions, as labeled by the Enneagram theorists, form the basis for the decisions each of the types make.  A person whose principal type is One will seek to be perfect and thus his or her decisions will reflect that compulsion.  The more you are into the type, the harder you will work towards perfection in most aspects of your life.  The theory also poses that each type takes on the characteristics of the neighbor type.  A Type One person may also move into the Type Two or the Type Nine modality.  Furthermore, when a type is in a good mood, they take on another type according to a flow diagram.  Under stress, a Type One becomes more like Type Sevens at their worst. When in a great mood, they behave more like Type Fours at their best.  It is somewhat complicated, but very interesting and powerful to help better understand how and why humans make decisions and the decisions they make.  To learn more, visit the Enneagram Institute’s website.

The process of decision-making is a lot more complex than you may have thought.  A lot goes into it.  Just read the list of factors I suggest are involved:

• Our conditions and circumstances
• Our self-image
• Our need level (met/unmet)
• Our state of mind or mood
• Our goals, objectives, aims, intentions, agenda, etc.
• Our values and beliefs
• Our responsibilities
• Our commitments
• Our temperament
• Our habits
• Our environment: Comfort, distractions (sights and sounds), attraction (towards/away)
• Our presence of mind
• Our skills and knowledge
• Our sense of time
• Our sense of commitment
• Our sense of responsibility
• Our sense of importance
• Our sense of power
• Our attention
• Implications and consequences

In subsequent posts, I will delve further into this fascinating process.  In the mean time, keep an eye out for your decision making-process and approach.  What drives your decisions?  Which type is dominant in you and those you lead?  How does this impact you and your organization?

The BEST is Yet to Come!

Epi Torres, CEO

Many factors influence at what point in time we make decisions.  Our circumstances, conditions, needs, wants, emotional state, knowledge, etc. play a role in the timing of our decisions.  The type of decision is another important factor.  Decisions can be categorized as critical (a decision with life or death or other BIG implications), Important, or not important.  We are supposed to eat when we are hungry.  However, other factors affect our decision to eat:

• The availability of food
• What food is available
• The condition of the food (fresh/old)
• Our taste in food
• Our attention/focus on what we are doing
• Our ability to buy food (as in having money)

It is amazing all that goes into when we make decisions.  As we get hungrier, the importance of the aforementioned factors varies.  Ultimately, we eat whatever is available.  In fact, we’ll eventually do whatever it takes to feed ourselves.  We MUST eat!  Eating is critical to our survival and our survival is a preeminent human need that trumps any other according to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.  Humans will do almost anything to survive!

Unmet human needs drive the timing of our decisions.   Our best and worst decisions are made based on these needs.  According to Maslow’s theory, there is a hierarchy of needs we must meet.  Lower-level needs must be met before higher-level ones.  There is not much more you can do if you are out of air, water, and food.  These are basic needs.  Never try to make important decisions on an empty stomach.

Our personality or temperament also affects decision-making.  According to the popular MBTI® (personality) type theory, there are two basic decision styles and two decision-making speeds that affect our decision approach.

“Thinking” types use logic to judge the world around them while “Feeling” types judge things according to the emotions they produce.  “Judging” types are more methodical and results-focused. Thus, they may take longer to arrive at decisions.  On the other hand, “Perceiving” types are better multi-taskers and more flexible and may make decisions faster.

The first decision we have to make is making a decision itself.  Delaying decision-making or action is also known as procrastination.  Apparently we all suffer from it.  Some more than others, but we all procrastinate.  We put things off.  There are good and bad implications from procrastination.  It may be perhaps the most impacting aspect of decision-making.  Putting things off has a big impact on our life.  Procrastination is a complex human phenomenon.  Much has been written about it.  I believe that it is modulated by the meaning we give things.  When we procrastinate, we are avoiding something and its meaning. The meaning of what we are avoiding is at the root of why we procrastinate.  We become habituated to doing things later or waiting until the last minute.  Without intervention, it becomes a really bad habit that can have bad implications in all the key aspects of life I mentioned in my earlier post:

• Health and Fitness
• Relationships
• Wealth

Procrastination causes anxiety and stress that can impact our health and fitness.  Stress can put us in bad moods that can affect our relationships.  Stress makes us less intelligent and impacts our ability to make better decisions about money.   One thing leads to another.  Delaying to eat better or to start exercising causes health and fitness issues in the future.  Delaying to ask someone on a date can make you lose the opportunity if someone else asks before you do.  Delaying an investment decision/action can make you miss a great financial gain opportunity.  I could go on and on but I hope I made the point.

A lot of factors influence when decisions are made.  It is a complex process.  I hope that becoming and remaining highly aware of this will help you manage it better.  Keep that in mind!

The BEST is Yet to Come!

Epi Torres, CEO

In my last post, I wrote about why we make decisions.  We do so because we have no choice.  Decisions are necessary to live, thrive and survive in this world. In this post, I will delve into what we decide and what kinds of things we decide on.

The implication of most decisions we make fall into one or more of three general areas:

• Health/Fitness
• Relationships
• Wealth

These areas are what I consider key quality of life factors.  Balance among them determines the level of quality of life we live.  Not only decisions affect each of them, but also decisions in one impact the others in varying ways. Our health and fitness can affect our relationships and or wealth.  Our wealth can affect our relationships and health.  They are all intertwined.

The decisions we and others made in the past have created the conditions we find ourselves in today.  The food we chose to eat and the amount of activity we expended determines, in large measure, our health and fitness outside any genetic influences.  The people we chose to associate with determine the relationships we have.  The effort we chose to put into school, work, class choices, and job experiences impacts our wealth.

The challenge is to realize these implications at the right time.  So often we do not see how something today can impact one or more of these areas in the future.  The challenge is that humans are “wired” to focus on the now and to only think of the pleasure or pain of the moment.  It is hard to connect decisions and actions now to the longer term.

The Core Decisions

I suggest that our destiny is determined by three core decision areas and six choices that we make on an ongoing basis. See diagram below:

The choices we make depend on a number of factors and conditions.  Our needs, values, beliefs, goals, commitments, and our emotional state (at the decision point) affect the choices we make.  They determine whether we do something or nothing, whether we do it now or later, and whether we do it well or poorly.

Ultimately, as I mentioned earlier, our health, fitness, relationships, and wealth will depend on the choices we make along these core decisions.  Decisions of what we do, when we do it, and how we do it determine the quality of life we live along the three aforementioned dimensions. The key is to do the right things right at the right time! The harder questions are:

• What are the right things?
• What does right mean?
• What is the right/best time?

It all depends on what you want and how bad you want it.  You decide.

The BEST is Yet to Come!

Epi Torres, CEO

We have no choice but to make decisions. Decision-making is a critical human endeavor. When you think about it, there is no life without decisions.  We make them from the moment we rise in the morning to the time we get back to sleep at night.  We have needs that we must meet and many choices to meet those needs.

According to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, humans have five different levels of needs:

• Self-Actualization
• Self-Esteem
• Belonging
• Safety
• Physiological

In order to meet these needs, we have to make decisions regarding the choices available to us that satisfy the need at hand.  Additionally, there are other decision-making drivers that force us to make decisions:

• Problems
• Opportunities

We are constantly presented with problems and opportunities and we must choose whether or not to act to resolve problems or take advantage of opportunities.

At the very basic level of human nature, we make three basic decisions in response to perceived threats or stress:

• Fight
• Flight
• Freeze

Those are the only choices we have.  They are the most basic survival tendencies we share with many or perhaps all animal species.  They also form the foundation for personality or temperaments in humans.

The bottom line is that humans must make decisions in order to live, thrive, and survive. We have no choice but to do so.

In the following posts, I will explore the subject in more detail. I will explore their process, contexts, criteria, etc.

The BEST is Yet to Come!

Epi Torres, CEO

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 unique set of value drivers they we’ll use to evaluate the quality of service being provided to them.

It is the responsibility of the service provider to manage their customer’s expectations throughout the entire sales and service delivery life-cycle.   Customers that have a firm understanding of the service offerings, emergency response times, work request lead times and completion times have a much greater chance at being a satisfied customer than those that don’t.

Let’s face it, being a technical service provider isn’t an easy job to begin with.  Your customers will hold you to a higher standard than they do their own in-house personnel.    And they should.  Why complicate the customer management process by not providing your customers with a strong understanding of what they can expect from your organization?

Defining a set of clear, concise Service Level Agreements (SLAs) will help to solidify support requirements and dispel any incorrect assumptions a customer may have on the services your organization provides.  Your customers probably won’t be aware of your current workload and resulting work request lead times until you tell them.

I am a firm believer that every IT unit should meet with their internal and/or external customer base that they support to establish a set of measurable Service Level Agreements.  You don’t have to be a third-party services provider to take advantage of the benefits that a well-defined set of SLAs provides.   I have created a standard SLA document for each company I have been involved with, whether I was an internal employee, consultant or third-party service provider.

Our SLA document at Remote DBA Experts is fairly simple.   It contains Service Categories and individual services.   The SLA entry is clear and concise.   Each entry contains a description of the service, when we will provide the service (upon request, ongoing, reoccurring frequency) and the amount of time the customer can expect the service activity to be completed by.

Service Level Agreement Development:

• Service Identification – The first step is to create a list of services your organization provides to the internal and/or external customer base.   The Information Technology Infrastructure Library, or ITIL as it is most commonly known by, uses the term “Service Catalog” to describe the service listing. ITIL documentation states that IT organizations “must identify what internal and external customers expect” from the service organization before the Service Catalog can be created.   Identifying what your customers want is beyond the scope and intent of this article.   Our focus is to ensure that your customers fully understand the level of service your organization will provide to them.  It is important to list all of the services you offer.  Your SLA document may not contain a minimum service level for all of them, but each one must be evaluated.  You also need to identify if you are guaranteeing any minimum levels of availability and performance for products, applications, hardware components that your unit supports.
• Identify key Service Groupings for the SLA Document – Categorize your list of services into groupings of similar service activities.   At Remote DBA Experts, we have grouped our services into the following basic categories:
  • Customer Integration Activities – Our SLA contains a list of customer integration services that we will perform and their associated target dates.   Not only do we offer customer integration service levels to our customers, we have also defined a set of service levels that we ask all new customers to adhere to during the integration process.   Since we are a remote services provider, we need connectivity, accounts/passwords, environmental descriptions, etc.  Customers understand that we need this information before we can begin servicing their account.   Our SLAs state what we need from the customer and when we need it by.  The remaining service groupings are fairly obvious.
  • Monitoring – Robust monitoring is a key benefit that we provide to our customers here at Remote DBA Experts.  Our SLAs state what we monitor, how often we monitor a particular resource or event, and how quickly we will respond (15 minutes in our case) if a threshold is exceeded or a monitored event occurs.
  • Problem Resolution Activities - One of our SLAs is “Provide expert diagnostic analysis for all database operational problems that arise.”  The frequency is “Upon Problem Identification” and the Service Level is “Troubleshooting begins within 15 minutes of problem identification and continues until problem resolution.”  It tells our customers that when we identify a problem, we will be logged into their systems within 15 minutes and will work on it until it is fixed.   Pretty clear.
  • Database Maintenance and Tuning – This category contains a listing of the various service activities we will perform daily, weekly and monthly to ensure each database is highly available and has optimal performance.
  • Change Management – Our largest category contains all of the changes we can be asked to make to a customer’s database and/or schema.
  • Backup/Recovery and Disaster Recovery – We feel that this set of services is so important to our service offering that we have a service grouping that contains all of the key activities related to making sure our customer’s databases are available when they need them.
  • Installs/Upgrades/Clones – This category contains some of the most time consuming activities that we do for a customer.  The completion times are clearly stated.  We don’t want our customers to enter a ticket to clone their 14 tier Oracle E-Business Environment by the next morning.  Since we service multiple customers here at Remote DBA Experts, clearly stated notification and completion times for time-consuming projects are critical to our ability to service our entire customer base.
  • High Availability Configurations – RAC, Fail Safe, O/S, Data Guard and vendor provided high availability installation services are contained in this category.
  • Customer Management – This category contains all of the activities that relate to informing the customer of our activities.  Entries include meeting frequency, monthly reports, time reports, Root Cause Corrective Action discussions when problems occur and how quickly we will respond to a customer request for additional information.   If it is a communication activity or mechanism with the customer – its in there.

Helpful Hints for Service Level Agreements:

• Make every effort to create a complete list of service activities.  As stated previously, although every activity you identify may not be included in the Service Level Agreement, each one must be evaluated.
• Categorize your list of services into groupings of similar service activities.
• Don’t use high-tech verbiage to describe the service activity. Make the service description clear and concise.  Remember that your audience isn’t as technical as you are.
• During contract negotiations with external customers or meetings with your internal customers, take the time to describe each service entry.   Make sure your customers fully understand each line item.   If your customers find a particular service entry to be confusing or unclear, modify the entry and keep modifying it until it is clear.
• Routine reviews of your service entries and comparing them against changing customer needs are essential to ensure that your services and minimum service levels continue to satisfy customer requirements.
• Don’t create service level metrics for minimum thresholds (uptime and performance levels for example), that are outside of your control.    If you don’t completely control the environment, don’t guarantee a minimum threshold metric for it.   If you must, ensure that the verbiage of the service level metric description clearly states that your organization will only be held responsible for those activities that they do control.  For example, if you are a database unit, you don’t want to miss a minimum service level metric for application availability because of a network problem.  Guarantee only what you can control.

At Remote DBA Experts, we review all of our SLAs on a regular basis.  We also perform in-depth analysis on how well we are accomplishing each of our service level activities defined in our SLA documents.  We use these results to create an internal “report card” that we use to measure our success as a service provider.   If we find that we are weak in some areas, we take steps to correct the deficiency and quickly move on.

There is a direct correlation between how clearly a customer understands your service level guarantees and a successful customer/service provider relationship.  As I stated previously, you probably won’t be meeting all of your customer’s expectations if they (and you) don’t have a firm understanding of what they are.

Thanks for Reading,

Chris Foot
Oracle Ace
Director Of Service Delivery

Life is all about decisions.  We wake up and there we go — It’s decisions all the way to the end of the day.   What do I wear? What do I eat/drink?  How much do I eat/drink?  Do I drive or take the bus/train/etc.?  That is just to start!  We are constantly making decisions about what, why, when, where, how, and who matters all day long.  It is almost a 24×7 proposition.  There are lots of things to decide about at every moment!

Not enough attention is paid to the subject of decisions, and yet, it is perhaps one of the most critical human capacities there is with significant implications associated to them.  In the next few posts, I plan to expand upon this important subject.  I will explore the decision process and the key factors that affect our decisions.  I will explore five aspects of decisions including:

• Why decisions are made — Why do we have to make decisions?
• What decisions are made — What type of decisions do we have to make?
• When decisions are made — At what points (in time) do we make what decisions?
• How decisions are made — What process do we use to make decisions?
• Who makes decisions — What is the hierarchy of decision making?

Decisions we and others make have a significant impact on us.  Those decisions affect many areas of life, and can determine how we live our life. They directly and indirectly affect our fitness and health, our relationships, and our wealth.

I hope this post series will shine a light on this critical subject and help readers better understand and appreciate the importance of the subject and the process.

The BEST is Yet to Come!

Epi Torres, CEO

If I had to choose one human frailty that has the biggest impact on our lives, it has to be follow-through, or lack of follow-through to be more precise.  We set goals and we don’t follow-through.  We make commitments and we don’t follow-through.  We make resolutions (every year) and we don’t follow-through.  It is a big problem for many of us.  According to the authors of a book by the same title, Following Through, Steve Levinson, Ph.D. and Peter Greider, M.Ed., the reason many struggle with it is because we are “wired” by nature not to do so.  Based on their theory, it seems that it is simply in our human nature: “Humans are born with a hard-wired tendency to be more heavily influenced by what feels most real at the moment than by what we know is important in the long-run.”

According to them, the way to get around this “innate handicap” or “design flaw” is to get our two key systems that help guide human behavior to work together to help us follow-through more and better.  One system, the “PGS” or Primitive Guidance System “was designed to make sure that you detect and respond to the need, want, threat, or opportunity that’s most in your face right now” (p.52). “The PGS has both feet firmly planted in the present moment. It’s in the business of detecting and responding not to well-thought-out intentions, but to what’s happening right now.”  The (more) modern system, the “IBGS” or Intelligence-Based Guidance System, “uses intelligence to figure out the best course of action. It’s designed to make sure we behave in accord with our well-thought-out conclusions about what’s best for us” (p.54).

In their book, Levinson and Greider offer us seven strategies we can use to engage these systems and to make them work together to our benefit:

• Spotlighting
• Willpower Leveraging
• Finding the RIGHT reason(s)
• Leading the horse to water
• Going Too Far
• Right Before Wrong
• Strike While the Iron Is Hot

Let me give you a short description of each of these strategies:

Spotlighting: Its purpose is to remind you of your intention so it won’t get lost in the shuffle.  The idea is to use cues and your imagination to keep the intention or goal in mind.  Posted notes with the goal on them is one way to use cues.  Using the PC screen saver to repeat a mantra is another.  Remind yourself of the benefits of accomplishment and the hazards of not doing so and use your imagination to think how you would feel one way or the other.

Willpower Leveraging: Its purpose is to increase what you can accomplish with the willpower you have.   The idea is to take an easy step today that makes it much more likely that you’ll do the right thing tomorrow. Hiding or giving away the (bad) food you don’t want to eat when you get hungry (out site, out of mind).  The following metaphors offer great examples of what this strategy means:

• Locking all the exits
• Burning all the boats
• Burning all the bridges

Finding the RIGHT reason(s): Its purpose is to energize. Great reasons provide motivational energy that helps us accomplish things and overcome temptations and obstacles in the way of accomplishing.  When you have and keep remembering these reasons, they provide power to act.  Emotional energy is the key to success.  You must feel the power of these reasons.  They must be very important to you and not anyone else!!!  Many successful people who become wealthy were energized by trying to prove someone wrong—someone who told them that they would not amount to anything because they did not do well in school for example.  Reasons are POWERFUL!!!

Leading the horse to water: Its purpose is to get you started.  Here the point is to get you going.  It is one I use often when I don’t feel like running on my treadmill.  I simply start walking slower than usual.  Magically, ten minutes later I find myself running.  It is amazing!!!  When you don’t feel like it, just start with the easy part and you’ll be amazed what can happen.

Going Too Far:  Its purpose is to create an exaggerated mindset.  In this strategy, you tell yourself that if you eat cake (and you are not supposed to in your diet) you will eat the whole cake or nothing.  It is about doing the wrong things unusually wrong.  It is a form of negative Psychology.

Right Before Wrong:  Its purpose is similar to the one above.  In this strategy, you commit to do something good/better before you do something “bad”.  I will run two miles before I can eat cheesecake for desert today.  It helps telling others about your commitment too.

Strike While the Iron Is Hot:  Its purpose is to leverage the current energy level.  In this strategy, you do what you want to right away.  Do it at the peak of emotional energy. Leverage the feelings to take action and make progress towards the goal.

Follow-through is critical to our success.  Learning strategies that help us overcome our habits or human tendencies can be powerful.  Adapt and try some of the above strategies to help you accomplish more of the things you want in life at home or at work.  And, by the way, the book,  Following Through, is full of much more than I gave you here — It is well worth a read!!!

The BEST is Yet to Come!

Epi Torres, CEO