Lead IT technician and manager in businesses

 Lead IT technician and manager in businesses

The stakeholders are the businesses and their clients.  Since this is a bank/credit union, the stakeholders for this upgrade are the brick and mortar bank employees as well as the employees at the headquarters.  Though this is a small banking operation, they still need to be able to have a separate bank location from the business location.  The people that need to be involved with this process are the technical leads within IT, the Ecommerce and marketing leads and engineers, and the local branch managers.  The reason the branch managers need to be involved is because they deal with the programs and technology locally.  They know what each department inside the local branch does and what they need to use to get their job done.  They also have insight as to what programs are being used.  The branch managers are only being involved for the discovery of the project and to make sure that there are no rogue software programs or features being used for the transition. By introducing these key players they will be able to “Have an equally clear understanding of your business needs, including application, storage and processing requirements to run the apps that run your business” (Vladimirskiy, 2016).

The reason the lead IT folks are being involved is because they have likely completed this task before at another company or prior to this refresh/upgrade project.  When talking with the lead IT technicians, they would need to engineer a solution for implementation.  They would need to make sure that all programs and features being used at a local branch are being captured and researched to make sure that they are able to move to a Windows 7 environment from an XP environment.  Another aspect of the business is the ecommerce side of things.  With the ecommerce part of the business getting involved, they would be able to determine what parts of their online presence would get affected by the upgrade and what would need to get upgraded. They would also be in charge of what the customers would see on the website.  This would either choose to leave the website as it was, or the ecommerce team would then be tasked to perform a customer experience upgrade.

The departmental points of contact would be the Lead IT technician and manager, as well as the Lead IT ecommerce marketing employee and manager.  In addition, there would be the Local Branch Managers.  Each will have a specific aforementioned duty to render this project successful.

One of the things that the Local Branch Managers, as well as ecommerce people, will be tasked with is providing a list of programs and features that they use daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly.  This will provide a full analysis of each program that they will need and use to perform all responsibilities.  Here would be a list of all of the programs will be evaluated to determine if they can be upgraded or not.  The technicians would then need to figure out what type of licensing agreements they have with each company.  These agreements would then need to be negotiated with the outside vendors to determine if the licensing would be an individual license or group licenses. “New hardware and software capabilities minimize operating expenses, maximize efficiency, and help ensure security and compliance” (Intel, 2013).

Once all research has been conducted to find out if the migration is successful, a production turnover process will initiate.  This is where the Lead IT and Technical Engineers will become heavily involved.  The technicians and engineers will work together to come up with a proper documented process that will encompass all of the necessary programs and features needed to migrate and turn them over to the local branch managers and ecommerce teams.  Each team will then review the documentation processes and approve each of them for accountability.  Once the documentation and processes have been approved, they will turnover back to the IT teams to begin the processes.

The reason to gather all of the vendors together is so that the bank/credit union is able to come up with new agreements to either save on money or upgrade services based on the needs of the business and consumers.  When negotiating license agreements, it is vital to make a list of all of the features you would need to use in each program, want in a program, and ones left to be desired.  Here it would make the negotiating process go more smoothly as well as save the bank/credit union money in the long run.  This would also help or hinder productivity within the organization.  Another key role is to search other outside vendors and not being afraid to negotiate and ask what can you do for me immediately and how it would be different than using other outside vendors.

The fact that this is a financial business means that any online presence that the bank/credit union has needs to be air tight in security.  “On top of saving your practice money, a well laid out, strategic IT plan allows you to make decisions that will save your practice time and get the most out of your technology” (Rassier, 2017). When dealing with this type of seriousness, bringing in an outside security auditing company and website vendor may be ideal.  Since this is a small business, the IT people wear many hats and it would be hard to assume that someone specializes in IT security as much as an outside vendor would.  A license agreement would be needed to guarantee that the outside vendor would not steal, trade, borrow, or bribe someone else for more information, and that information will remain within the doors of the bank/credit union.