Data Center Operations Manager

Position Title: Data Center Operations Manager

Location: Sacramento, CA 94203

Position type: w2/C2C/1099

Contact duration: 6 months

PROJECT SCOPE/TASKS

The scope of this project encompasses the following tasks:

During the first 90 days, assess the operational maturity of the IT Operations Group. Improve outage communications to management and customers, assess current operational status of the production guides, monitoring and outage root causes which will develop an improvement plan. The goal is to ensure that mission critical applications are available at 99.9% and that the tools, processes and procedures align to our customer service level objectives.

During the second 90 days, execute the plan to reduce outage durations and the total number of outages per year.

Specific expected tasks

Assessment

Obtain existing or create a list of systems describing:
i. Customer facing and critical systems
ii. Back Office primary systems- Customer facing systems depend on these for functionality
iii. Back Office secondary systems - have no interfaces to items 1.a.i or 1.a.ii and Customer facing systems do not depend on these systems.

i. Specific Monitoring alerts traces to a specific technical remediation(s)
ii. Quality of system architecture documentation including network, Firewalls, Servers, storage hostnames, IP addresses, load balancers, etc.
iii. Outage communications to customers (splash/maintenance page notifications)
iv. Outage communication lists and remediation status to internal management including escalation notifications depending on the duration of the outage.
v. Restart processes.
vi. Third-party vendor IT assistance.
vii. Internal IT Operations escalations procedures for more senior technical assistance.

i. Review previous 6 months of outage root cause documents to determine if alert notification detected the situation. If documentation is not available, conduct 1 on 1 interview with all levels of operational personnel concerning the previous 3 months of outages and consolidation into a staff recommendations analysis of why monitoring did not detect the problem(s) are and what improvements should be made. Supplement staff analysis with consultants experience on how to improve service levels. Develop metrics for uptime and outages.
Review and provide commentary on the quality of Production Run Guides/Books for the above systems including:
Quality of monitoring to detect outages

Enhanced Process and Procedures
Create and initiate procedures to improve service operations and the information flow of outages to both internal and external customers
i. Customers should not see a URL error, but an informative splash screen on the current availability of the system and a Real Time update on when the system will be available.
ii. IT management and (when warranted by predefined process) Executive Management, be notified of an outage, who is affected, what are any resource or vendor blocks and the estimated time of restored services

i. Review previous 3 months of outage root cause documents. If documentation is not available, conduct 1 on 1 interviews with all levels of operations personnel and determine what improvements need to be made.
Outage root cause historical analysis

Service Improvement Plan
Develop a Service Improvement Plan.
Create an integrated work breakdown structure aligning key milestones/actions to resources.
Once the plan and schedule are approved by Senior Management, turn over to IT Operation Managers to oversee and manage.

Implement three critical changes outlined in the Service Improvement Plan and approved by Senior Management.

MINIMUM QUALIFICATIONS

Must have a minimum of five (5) years' experience managing the operations of a Data Center at least equivalent to the size and complexity of.

Must have a minimum of five (5) years' experience performing architecture quality assurance for complex projects and initiatives; performing enterprise applications integration (EAI); defining and developing shared services architectures; designing and developing component architectures; and/or defining enterprise technology architectures; at least three (3) years of said experience must have been at a high level both technically and in measure of responsibility.

Must be able to analyze data and situations, identify and solve problems, reason logically, draw valid conclusions, and develop effective solutions.

Must be able to apply creative thinking in the design of methods for processing data.

Must be able to establish and maintain cooperative working relationships with others.

Must communicate effectively both verbally and in writing with a variety of audience types using different mechanisms including informal updates, formal presentations, business case documents, and other analytical and technical documents.