An Introduction to Tools and  Techniques

I’ve recently been working as a Business Analysis trainer and in this position have had the opportunity to use and teach many interesting techniques. I though I’d share some of my thoughts on some of the techniques as they come to me!

The first technique/tool I wanted to talk about is RACI Matrices. These are becoming the way of working with stakeholders and allow you to identify how a stakeholder is involved with a specific activity or process.

A Case Study

As I go through this article I will be using an example business system to show how the tool fits in. The example I will use will be for a library. A traditional library that lends books (you know… these places that lend dead trees to people by scanning a card, stamping a book and getting them to return the item when they’ve finished with it).

What does RACI Stand for?

RACI is an acronym which stands for “Responsible”, “Accountable”, “Consulted” and “Informed”.  There are several variations to this but this is the most commonly used set so I will use this for the purpose of this article.

Now we know what the letters stand for lets consider what the categories mean and which stakeholders may fall into each within our library example.

Responsible

The stakeholders in this category are the ones who operate/run the area under investigation. In our library lets consider the function of “Lend Books”. The stakeholders we would consider responsible for the “Lend Books” function would be the librarians at the desk who take people’s library cards, scan the books and issue the loans to lenders.

Accountable

Accountable stakeholders are those at which “the buck stops”. The person with overall responsibility for the task at hand. Often a managerial role falls into the accountable area. In our library example it would be someone like the head of the librarians at the desk. This person is responsible for the accurate and complete completion of the “Lend Books” function.

Consulted

These stakeholders are people who need to be liaised with about the completion of the task. This implies a two way communication. In the library example if our lender has outstanding fines to pay for late return of items, an account administrator may be consulted as to the account status before a loan is permitted.

Informed

Informed stakeholders are those who are “kept in the loop” about goings on but do not have any input to the operation of the function. Due to the non-input nature of this relationship a single direction of communication is inferred here. In out library example, the overall library manager may wish for management information about the number of loans or other performance metrics of the process and would therefore be informed about the process.

RACI Roles

Now we have an idea of what each element of the RACI are lets lay out some rules for using a RACI Matrix (We’ll see soon why it’s called a matrix).

• Responsible and Accountable positions are only assigned to one stakeholder role.
• Often the role that is accountable for a task is also responsible for it. In this case only the Accountable role is added and the Responsible is assumed to be the same person
• Except for the Responsible and Accountable roles, all other roles are mutually exclusive. For example, a stakeholder can not be both Responsible for a task as well as Informed about the task.
• The role that is Responsible for a task obtains information required to complete the task from the Consulted role. This implies a two-way communication.
• The Responsible role updates the Informed role about the task. This implies a one way channel of communication.
• The Responsible role may delegate responsibilities to others in their team.

Why a Matrix?

Lets get an idea of why it’s called a RACI Matrix. Usually the roles/tasks/stakeholders are presented in tabular form. Let’s build a table for the library example presented in this article.

Based on the above lets look at the matrix. We have a county council linked with the library who oversee the operation of the library and want information about the number of items leant, the number of returns, late loans etc. They are not involved in the operation of the library but need information from it.

There are multiple roles that are consulted to complete certain tasks. For example, the lend books function relies on both the lender and the finance clerk to provide information to allow the function to be completed. Similarly with “Register New Borrowers” updates both the County Council and Finance Clerk about the output of registering new borrowers.

The “Set Targets” function does not have a Responsible task specified directly and therefore this falls under the Accountable task to complete, i.e. the Library Manager.

Summary

This technique is a very useful tool for business analysts and project managers to aid with stakeholder management. It provides useful information about the functions and processes being investigated and which stakeholders may be affected by any proposed changes.

Again another Zend Framework issue. I’ve been trying to work out how to detect if a current page is active when using zend navigation. I have setup an XML document with the navigation structure I am after but was having problems detecting if a higher level node in the structure was the currently active branch.

Example:

Page 1
   Sub Page 1
   Sub Page 2 - Currently active page
   Sub Page 3
Page 2
Page 3

I was wanting to know when looking at the top level pages which one of Page 1, Page 2 or Page 3 was the current branch. I know the isActive() method exists for the current page but what I didn’t realise (and is not advertised on the send manual pages) is that passing the parameter “true” to the method makes is recursive.

By calling isActive(true) on the current node I was able to determine if the current branch I was looking at is the actual branch I require.

I’m sorry to say that I’ve had to require registration before people are able to leave comments on this blog now. I’ve been getting a lot of comment spam so I’ve temporarily activated the requirement for registration before comments are allowed until I’ve managed to put some form of protection in place.

I’ve recently stared monitoring a mailbox for errors on a website. When an error occurs it sends an email to a Tech Support mail box. When I check through this box there are several emails that are from known sources and I like to clean the box down. When I do this however all the deleted items end up in my own mailboxes deleted items folder! This is not what I want to happen.

There is a solution to this however that requires a little bit of registry modification. If you set values as outlined below the deleted items will end up in the box of the person you deleted it from.

Key: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\xx.x\Outlook\Options\General
Value name: DelegateWastebasketStyle
Value Type: REG_DWORD
Value: 4

Note the xx.x should relate to the version of outlook you are using. For Outlook 2010 this is 14.0, for outlook 2007 this is 12.0

Credit for this goes to: http://www.msoutlook.info/question/130

UPDATE:

There is a similar fix for sent items. If you follow the instructions as listed in this MS KB article: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/972148

For outlook 2010 see: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en/outlook/thread/4d38fdb9-e85b-4eac-b1b1-553e01bf168e

Lots of people probably already know that it is possible for you to have a slide show as your desktop background. What a lot of people probably don’t know is that you can have an RSS feed as your desktop. For example, you can use something like the nasa daily theme.

I’ve just created a theme for with the help of this article. I’ve modified it slightly to use the nasa large image of the day at: http://www.nasa.gov/rss/lg_image_of_the_day.rss

If you want to use this theme. See here: NASA Theme. Simply download it, unzip it and double click on it. When asked, say you want to download the elements of the RSS theme. It may take some time to download the images so if you don’t get a background straight away try switching the theme and back again.

As part of our setup we have a branch office server running Server 2008 R2. To ensure data was kept in sync between the two servers we setup some data replication namespaces and replication groups. This certainly makes replicating data to the new server a lot easier and allows a slightly more piecemeal approach to the migration.

To begin with I’ve setup the new server as another member of the replication group and replicating with the server it is replacing. I did it this way because both machines are virtual and are running on a Hyper-V host. Between the two servers in the virtual environment is a 10 Gigabit network (speedy!!). This will allow fast replication of the data between the two servers.

All users redirected data is accessed via a domain namespace. For example \\mydomain.local\Users\<username>. This again aids the transfer process. When we have low server usage one weekend I plan to re-structure the replication groups and namespaces. As all the data is kept in sync between the servers, when everything is sync’ed I can simply change the replication to replicate to the branch server from the new server as well and remove the old server from the list. This will then mean all users data and shares (again accessed by the namespace) will be being accessed from the new server.

1 very large step closer to the completion of the migration.

We are in the process of migrating our server at work from Windows Small Business Server 2008 to Small Business Server 2011. There is a good article on the microsft site for working through this process. I’d recommend reading this if you are doing a similar migration (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg615506.aspx).

I’m planning on writing a few articles about the process of doing this migration. As a starting note I’m just going to give a note on starting the process. One of the first things to do is install the new version of the server in migration mode. To achieve this you need to create a set up answer file. This set up file needs to be placed on the root of any drive connected to the server. In our case we were installing the new server on a Hyper-v virtualisation server. The quickest way of achieving this is to create a small virtual hard disk and add the file to this.

The point we stumbled on was not reading the manual (aren’t all techies guilty of this from time to time!). The answer file needs to be called sbsanswerfile.xml or unattended.xml. We had not called the file this and was not being detected on the drive.

I’ll post more progress updates when we get further down the line!

I’m still battling with getting a replacement stereo head unit for my partners car. I’ve contacted them several times but they are just piss poor at responding to communication. I’ve just called them again and been told that there is nothing they can do at the moment because the returns people are not in the office on a Saturday.

I told the gentleman on the phone that I would like a call back on Monday. Should I not have this issue resolved within the next few days I will be contacting trading standards and will be following it up with legal action if they fail to respond.

As I’ve stated before they are shit. Just avoid them completely:

• Staff are rude
• Don’t follow up communications when the state they are going to
• They have issues with returns
• The mis-describe their products (Stated that a stereo is 100% bluetooth compatible when they don’t support A2DP)
• Can not deal with a customer enquiry because of people being out of the office.

My next step after this is going to be a complaint letter to their head quarters stating the issues I’ve had and that their staff member Gary Digva is quite frankly dismissive of queries and complaints.

At work we use a hosting company called VPS.net. They use clouds of virtual private servers. This blog is running on one. They are quite good because they enable users to create their own virtual servers from templates of machines (E.g. Linux with hardened web server etc.) This setup allows users to create machines based on a certain number of nodes. These nodes allow users to upgrade or downgrade with machines depending on demand. It’s quite a good system from that respect.

The downside of this setup is the stability. In the last 2 weeks this blog has had to be relocated to a different server due to significant corruption on the old server. There was a corruption on the cloud that caused the system to crash. All the backups of the server were lost as well meaning some data loss was encountered.

Today I’ve just had our main work server go down taking down the company website and another product we sell. Considering these both happened within two weeks it is a quite a bad story really. Personally I have some concerns regarding this stability. We will have to wait and see how things go. Still got concerns but we will wait and see if the stability improves.

Let me know your experiences of vps.net.

I think that I am almost fully up and running again after a hosting issue. VPS.net had some problems and caused some file corruption on the server I host this site on. I’ve setup on a new host so should be up and running again now!