April 8, 2015 at 12:30 pm
Over the course of several years, we have been repeatedly asked by our manager to come up with some visual charts/graphs etc. that would offer some insight into what the DBA team has accomplished. Visual aids that could shed some light into what it is we do. Items that he could use to present for the upper management team during their meetings. I can only come up with things like down time, or availability, or careful patching, tweaking security where it is showing weakness, but nothing that is not already well known (down time, for instance). I usually fall back on no news is good news.
I am asking if others have thought about this and come up with something they present to demonstrate what the team has done in the last month, quarter, week, etc. Any suggestions?
April 8, 2015 at 12:42 pm
Perhaps draw attention to standard maint. stuff DBAs do to keep the databases healthy?
I.E. Index Rebuilds, statistics updates, DBCC checks, making sure there are no missing/unused indexes, performing and monitoring backups, performance base-lining / monitoring, etc.
The Redneck DBA
April 8, 2015 at 12:50 pm
Thanks for the reply. Those could certainly come in handy. It would just be presentation that may be a bit challenging. I see pie charts that would hopefully be all green.
I guess that is my problem. I usually think in terms of what did NOT get done or went wrong rather that what all did get done or went well.
I will give it some thought.
April 8, 2015 at 3:26 pm
richard.bowles (4/8/2015)
Over the course of several years, we have been repeatedly asked by our manager to come up with some visual charts/graphs etc. that would offer some insight into what the DBA team has accomplished. Visual aids that could shed some light into what it is we do. Items that he could use to present for the upper management team during their meetings. I can only come up with things like down time, or availability, or careful patching, tweaking security where it is showing weakness, but nothing that is not already well known (down time, for instance). I usually fall back on no news is good news.I am asking if others have thought about this and come up with something they present to demonstrate what the team has done in the last month, quarter, week, etc. Any suggestions?
Yeah. Spend some serious time on this because this sounds an awful lot like they're looking for places to reduce staffing and, trust me on this, they're not going to fall back on the ol' "now news is good news" or the "you won't know what I do until I stop doing it" thing. You need to start documenting what you've done for the last year and what improvements you've made and how it either saved them money, will save them money, or will keep them in business if all hell breaks loose. And, you need to explain it all in a fashion to justify your position instead of having some company manage this stuff on a part time basis instead of paying you a salary, benefits, and the floor space you occupy.
--Jeff Moden
Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.
April 9, 2015 at 7:14 am
What we do is well documented, and management is well aware that they would have issues replacing any of the DBA team (although none can make their way without preparing for unknowns).
The problem is that my boss goes to upper management meetings with nothing but notes to read from. The other teams, which manage Windows servers or the Storage infrastructure, can produce 'pretty' charts and graphs because they are working to specific ends. The DBA's, on the other hand, work a variety of tasks that cross all infrastructure/application and business areas. I can't find any metrics to track this on, and many times the interactions last for minutes, sometimes weeks. We can track database growth, uptime, recoverability, availability and the obvious. Of course, those are being tracked either by the problems our team generates or through audit items that must be completed quarterly.
Really, he would like to add some graphics to his presentations.
April 13, 2015 at 2:31 am
Ideally you wont start talking about database specific stuff like index maintenance etc, as a board doesn't give a crap about any of that. You will try to relate your work back to the business that makes the company money or makes them efficient/
Does your team deal with performance issues? i.e. Business user says some critical report is running too long, you have a look and reduce the report runtime from 20 minutes to 2 or something. We used to get a lot of these.
If you can use these, a simple dashboard showing report run times before and after, in business analyst hours. so if a report is run 10 times a week and took 1 hour each time, but now takes 10 minutes each time, well thats a saving of 500 analyst/actuary/accountant minutes per week.
You can even do this with backup & recovery. Identify how much data you can recover on the critical databases in case of disaster.
Show this on a nice chart with a small tagline "in the event of catastrophic failure we can be backup and running in X minutes with only X minutes of data loss. give an estimate of how many business transactions at max may be lost.
Also do a count of all the tickets/issues you/your team have worked on in the past week supporting other teams. although many of them will be too technical to delve into, it will show that other teams depend on you, even if the end result doesnt show it. Relate these items/tickets to the projects in question so a board member can see that for new customer facing website you guys worked on 20 issues this week. without you this weeks release would not have happened.
Theres a bit of work in all of that, but once its done and automated it will pay off by showing your usefulness.
April 13, 2015 at 8:33 am
Thanks. Most of these are tracked in our ticketing system, so numbers and projects worked should not be a problem to find and report on.
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