Solution Design Archives ~ fitzmoskal https://fitzmoskal.me/tag/solution-design/ You are _here_ Thu, 29 Feb 2024 16:56:36 +0000 en-GB hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.9.4 https://fitzmoskal.me/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/cropped-result_880649-32x32.jpeg Solution Design Archives ~ fitzmoskal https://fitzmoskal.me/tag/solution-design/ 32 32 11678478 Egyptian Genomics Institute – Software Delivery https://fitzmoskal.me/egyptian-genomics-institute-software-delivery/ Mon, 26 Feb 2024 20:04:01 +0000 https://fitzmoskal.me/?p=1487 Software Delivery I managed the team that took part in a deployment of genomics analysis software to a government programme

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Software Delivery

I managed the team that took part in a deployment of genomics analysis software to a government programme based in Cairo Egypt worth £2m in total, I also acted as a hands-on technical lead.

I managed the resourcing of a consultant from China to attend for 3 weeks and had scheduled to be there on the first week. The deployment was time-sensitive and had to be completed on-premise in this window as we wouldn’t have remote access.

The consultant from China was delayed, so I had to use my technical skills to quickly get the install going having not performed one before. I did alone on the first day – a Sunday – and then brought in my other consultant and a DevOps resource on conference call for the following two days, until the Chinese consultant arrived. All this took place whilst the client was monitoring over my shoulder – so I had to present confidence in what I was doing at the same time. The software was successfully deployed inside of the 3 weeks. However there were some performance issues identifed.

Health Check

After concerns were raised by the client regarding performance – with accusations flying, I took the decision to prepare a mirror environment in our offices and we requested soem of their sample files to process and confirm that the software was capable of processing them – which it was. So the issues pointed to infrastructure.

I agreed to attend site with one of the product managers to perform a health check against the software and hardware. I had some input in what to look for from the DevOps team, but largely had to script the health check myself against Kubernetes, NFS and PostgreSQL. Onsite, I ran multiple tests and perfected the script which used a combination of tools including kubectl, docker, fio, iostat, mtr and netstat. With this I was able to narrow down the issue to packet loss between the application and NFS, which was hosted on a different network split by a switch or router – which was not as specified in the Solution Design we had outlined.

This helped to not only provide the customer with confidence in the solution and our commitment to support, but did prevent them from walking away from the contract as they had previously disputed ownership of the issue.

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Telecoms Company – Digital Transformation https://fitzmoskal.me/telecoms-company-digital-transformation/ Sat, 24 Feb 2024 01:59:07 +0000 https://fitzmoskal.me/?p=1443 My company was initially approached directly by this large telecoms company to deploy Discovery with CMDB. My role as the

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My company was initially approached directly by this large telecoms company to deploy Discovery with CMDB. My role as the Principal was technical lead for the project and Solution Architecture. Having worked with the client to draw up the Solution Design, they dropped the project after the first milestone, and used my Solution Design to deploy it themselves.

We were then approached approximately 12 months later by a large managed services company that had taken on the client and wanted to outsource to our Asset & Configuration service solution since they did not have the technical expertise. An intial gap analysis revealed they had mostly followed the design but were struggling in some key areas.

I worked with the MS provider to (now our customer) to workshop and architect the service, worth £240k, that we would provide which included the following roadmap:

  • Extend the current deployment and resolve gaps in estate scanning
  • Integrate with with Rapid7 to enhance CMDB with ownership details
  • Data Quality Assurance
  • Deployment of uControl for service modelling
  • Credential and license management analysis
  • Initiative to identify application owners to reduce risk and improve efficiency in reporting

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UK Charity – ITSM Project https://fitzmoskal.me/uk-charity-itsm-project/ Wed, 21 Feb 2024 17:24:54 +0000 https://fitzmoskal.me/?p=1408 I worked as a Project Manager for a UK London based charity client who presented some difficult challenges. The ITSM

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I worked as a Project Manager for a UK London based charity client who presented some difficult challenges. The ITSM deployment was standard Ivanti ITSM with Incident, Change and Service Request modules. Workshops were held and a Gap Analysis document was produced for the customer.

A standard project included only one round of review and feedback with a view to any revisions, however the client was very indecisive and had a lot of questions which resulted in several versions of the GA doc being proposed. After the solution was deployed issues were raised over design decisions – they disputed the latest version of the GA, and insisted that one of the earlier versions was the agreed version.

To resolve this, I took some time to quiz the consultant on how much effort it would be to make the changes they require, and after clarifying that it was mostly some ‘flick of the switch’ settings – I agreed that we would accomodate their disputed requirements.

After deployment, we also had to arrange training on each module. The client complained about the first trainer, so I arranged for a new trainer for the second session. This trainer also recieved complaints, so I organised another consultant for the final round of training – who predictably also recieved complaints.

As they had substantial complaints about not recieving the appropriate amount of training, I took the decision to deploy a consultant on-site for some extra consultancy days (agreed with the vendor) to for them to essentially request whatever changes they wanted and provide hands on knowledge transfer. This finally seemed to satisfy them and they even gave good feedback about my final consultant.

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UK Non-profit – Datacenter Migration https://fitzmoskal.me/uk-charity-datacenter-migration/ Wed, 21 Feb 2024 15:27:47 +0000 https://fitzmoskal.me/?p=1395 A UK non-profit organisation planned datacenter move within the next 12 months. The required an understanding of their environment, the

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A UK non-profit organisation planned datacenter move within the next 12 months. The required an understanding of their environment, the servers, applications and storage. Their main focus was on Production, DMZ and Disaster Recovery.

A successful proof of concept had been carried out prior and they were ready for deployment of the ITAM scanning solution.

A workshop was conducted to assess their capabilities and readiness as well as determine how the solution would be deployed. This results in a Solution Design and commencement of the deployment of scanning.

The client also required modelling of their application architecture in preparation, so they could understand the dependencies for the move. As well as delivering on these requirements within a six week timeframe, I was able to provide additional value by identifying approximately 100 Windows servers that were out of compliance.

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Logistics Company – Business Application Modelling https://fitzmoskal.me/logistics-company-business-application-modelling/ Tue, 20 Feb 2024 17:54:22 +0000 https://fitzmoskal.me/?p=1360 I was brought into save a project for a leading UK logistics company where the Discovery solution had been chosen

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I was brought into save a project for a leading UK logistics company where the Discovery solution had been chosen and deployed but the initial project team had failed to deliver. The challenge was that half of the budget had already been consumed and the client took a hardline sticking to their budget. This meant I had to deliver the full requirements in half the time.

I did not have time for workshops, so I had to identify the key stakeholders and go over their list of requirements from scratch, which they gracefully accomodated. I then manged to split the requirements between must-haves and nice-to-haves using MoSCoW. This allowed me to effectively prioritise what I should tackle first.

For this customer, I modelled the applications hosted on their WebSphere platform using a combination of out of the box discovery and some additional coding. I also managed to put together a Runbook and deliver on their nice-to-have reports. They were impressed and fully satsified with the work effort. The result was that they kept the solution and came back for more future work from us.

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Sample Sizing https://fitzmoskal.me/sample-sizing/ Mon, 19 Feb 2024 20:40:21 +0000 https://fitzmoskal.me/?p=1145 A small script utilising scikit-learn for predicting the size of a build of Congenica on-premise given the number of genome

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A small script utilising scikit-learn for predicting the size of a build of Congenica on-premise given the number of genome samples to process.

https://github.com/codefitz/sample-sizing

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