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Subject:RE: Are you using personas? From:John Posada <JPosada -at- book -dot- com> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Thu, 30 Jan 2003 17:35:31 -0500
Gary...almost 90% of what I do is to put the pieces together in a document
so that when something happens (or is going to happen) they can see the
relationships between different pieces.
A while ago, we discussed on this list about a Visio I did for the NOC that
was 7foot by 10foot. The reason for this diagram was so that when they know
a server on one system or database is being brought down, they can see what
other systems rely on that server and head the problems off at the pass.
Right now, I have in front of me a spreadsheet with 5,400 lines, with each
line designating a Database, MSMQ, stored proc., etc. The purpose of the
chart is so that when the NOC gets a message that something is down, they
get a feel of what else could be down and can estimate the impact
SO...to make a long story short, yep...you described the NOC pretty well.
John Posada
Senior Technical Writer
Barnes&Noble.com
jposada -at- book -dot- com
NY: 212-414-6656
Dayton: 732-438-3372
-----Original Message-----
From: Gary S. Callison [mailto:huey -at- interaccess -dot- com]
Sent: Thursday, January 30, 2003 5:23 PM
To: TECHWR-L
Subject: RE: Are you using personas?
On Thu, 30 Jan 2003, JPosada -at- book -dot- com (John Posada) wrote:
> Hey! I GET it now. In fact, I tell people that the audience for the Run
> book I just created was for Igor, the 3rd shift Network Operations
> Center Technician who's been on the job for a week and the network
> crashes at 4am.
> Now I need a face...
While I wrote an awful lot of documentation there, my last job was
ostensibly as a 3rd shift network operations center technician for a
backbone provider. If you need to put a face to your persona, here's a
picture of your 3rd-shift NOC monkey being mauled by a vicious killer pit
bull: <http://www.hyacinthine.net/Pets/Bikkit/P1010006.JPG>.
The NOC is a great place for tech writers to cross-train, if you get the
chance. A good ops-room guy has to know more than a little about a huge
number of things, and be able to see how it all integrates. The individual
procedures are mostly very small and very simple, but there's a huge
number of them, and the problem identification tree can be pretty
staggering when you're looking at the whole thing. The process of
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