As I mentioned in my last post, our key capabilities at Remote DBA Experts are those that support our ability to be most proactive, responsive and effective. Let me now expand upon each of the key capabilities.
Proactiveness Capabilities
Proactiveness is first and foremost an attitude. Thus, it comes from people and it starts with them. That means we must look for this attitude in our recruiting and hiring process. We hire individuals who are technically capable and meet many other criteria (see our hiring criterion here). That is where it all starts. Furthermore, we provide the individual with the ability to be most proactive by enabling proactivity with key capabilities. In the case of Proactiveness, our primary aim is internal and customer problem prevention.
In order to be most efficient and effective at problem prevention, we focus our attention and investment on the key capability components:
- Key Information
- Key Processes
- Key Skills
- Key Sub Capabilities
- Key Tools
- Other
The first step is to identify these key items and then to ensure they are in place and available to the team. This is where we focus our optimization efforts.
Here at Remote DBA Experts, our monitoring capability is the primary tool that enables us to predict and prevent problems and we place significant effort to that end. In fact, this year we invested a lot of money and attention to this capability. We have also established a new internal organization that is completely focused on problem prevention and customer responsiveness. It is working out to be one of our best ideas ever!
Responsiveness Capabilities
Like Proactiveness, Responsiveness is also an attitude we look for in the folks we recruit and hire. In this area we have also made significant efforts and investments recently to enhance this capability. We implemented a new CRM that is the key to improving and maintaining our ability to respond to our customers both internal and external.
Responsiveness involves four key aspects:
- Acknowledging
- Timely Action
- Updating
- Closure
Our Responsiveness Capabilities are focused on enabling these aspects. This ensures that we acknowledge customer requests quickly, take timely action, keep the customer informed along the way, and close the matter to the satisfaction of the customer.
Effectiveness Capabilities
For Remote DBA Experts, Effectiveness means accomplishing two primary things for our customers: Ensure the highest database environment availability and performance possible. That is it! That is what being effective means to our team.
Our Effectiveness Capabilities focus on two areas: Activities and Tasks.
Activities
Activities are what I call the set of “meta-activities” people must do effectively in order to accomplish value delivering tasks and achieve the key results customer expect. Effectively completing them is part of the sequence.
- Effective Preparation
- Effective Learning
- Effective Communication
- Effective Documentation
- Effective Search
- Effective Analysis
- Effective Collaboration
- Effective Research
To execute these activities most effectively, you need to clearly define each. You need to know and understand what Effectiveness means for every one of them. You need to know which of them are more vital to the end result. Spending too much time and/or effort on less vital activities will affect their proverbial strength as a link in the chain.
Tasks
Tasks are what customers hire us to do for them. Each of these tasks breaks down into many more “sub-tasks” for the lack of a better term. However, the three tasks listed below capture the essence of the services we deliver. Their effective completion is the ultimate contributor to us being most effective as a whole. Database availability and performance directly depend on how well we proactively monitor and maintain the databases under our stewardship. Furthermore, effectively preventing and resolving problems enhances our effectiveness.
- Effective Database Monitoring
- Effective Problem Management (prevention and resolution)
- Effective Database Maintenance
I hope this post gives you a better sense of our Key capabilities and how we go about them. In my next post, I will delve into the Capability Maturity subject. Thanks for reading!
The BEST is Yet to Come!
Epi Torres, CEO
Key Capability Maturity Optimization: Key Capabilities is a post from: Remote DBA Experts
. Instead, I’m hoping that I might get to visit Alcatraz this year. I’ve been to SF so very many times in the past 12 years, but have yet to take that tour, so I think it’s time (I’ve heard it is a really interesting tour).
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