Question

16. Why is Inventory Management important?

17. What are the typical parts of a Change Request Document?

18. A technician from your Internet Service Provider (ISP) has arrived to help you to troubleshoot a weal WAN connection. To what location should you take him?

19. What kind of security risks to your organization may the technician's visit from Problem 18 bring? Any recommendations on mitigation or avoiding those risks?

20. Why is it important to minimize cable clutter in a rack?

Answer 1

Answers:

16. Inventory management plays a critical role in the health of a business. It saves you money and allows you to fulfill your customers’ needs. In other words, it enables successful cost control of operations. Knowing what you have, what is in your warehouse, and how to manage the supply chain properly is the backbone of business. Inventory management allows you to make smart business decisions and close sales in confidence. It gives you real-time information about what sells well and what isn’t – in other words, what to order more of and what to cut back to maximize profits.

17. Typical parts of Change Request Document:

• Project name
• Change number
• Project manager name
• Requester name — in my view on small projects anyone on the project (customer or consultant) can request a change. In many cases the project manager would assist in the creation of the change request document and would most certainly review it before presenting it to the executive sponsor.
• Requested date
• Resolution requested by date — “ASAP” is not allowed at a date. ASAP means different things to the sender and receiver. To the sender it means now emphasis on the word, soon. To the receiver it means whenever emphasis on the word, possible.
• Description of change
• Business reason for change — This section must describe the economic benefit that the change will create. In short, if the economic benefit does not exceed the cost section below, it is unlikely the change will be accepted.
• Impact on scope — In a sense a change request is a mini scope document. Please remember that when scope changes there must be a change to cost and/or time.
• Impact on cost — This would detail the pricing change needed to perform the change.
• Impact on time
• Impact on quality — Remember if quality is affected all three of the other elements (scope, cost and time) must also be affected.
• Change accepted or rejected
• Reason for rejection, if rejected
• Signatures and dates

18. I would take the technician to network room where all the switches are setup to examine the devices and network cables configured to them

a. Theft vandalism of the infrastructure and/or hardware, disruption, accidental or intentional errors.

19. Security risks to your business when a technician from ISP visits your organisation:

a. Thefts

b. Vandalism of the infrastructure and/or hardware.

c. Disruption to business when troubleshooting a small issue leads to network downtime in entire organisation.

d. Accidental or intentional errors caused if the technician installs some patch leading to malware.

e. Loss of confidential data if any hardware gets corrupted while fixing network issues.

An organisation can mitigate above risks on following below recommendations:

a. Threats such as theft can be prevented by use of locked doors and restricted access to computer rooms.

b. Threats such as malware can be prevented by installing an antivirus software in all the systems in organisation.

c. Loss of confidential data can be prevented by using encrypted hard drives.

20. Importance of minimizing cable clutter:

a. Ease of use: It is important for wires and cables to be organized and color coding is a great way to know which cables are designated for certain tasks and plug ins. For example, Ethernet cables tend to be blue.

b. Fire Safety: If cables become tangled and are not properly managed, they are much more likely to lead to sparks and even a fire if the situation is left unchecked for a long enough period of time.

c. Troubleshooting: One of the first steps to troubleshooting a piece of electronic equipment always involves testing the data transfer cable to make sure that it is still in good working order. Such a simple task becomes infinitely more complex if you’re looking at dozens (or in certain cases hundreds) of tangled cables that are in disarray.

Minimizing cable clutter can also help to prevent airflow blockages in a typical rack system where the airflow through the chassis is typically designed to move from front to back.