CAREER-CLEAR

Employees are scored in a total of 5 categories. Upto 10 points can be earned in each category for a total of upto 50 points. The final score is then multiplied by a factor of 2 to give a standard scale of 0 to 100. Using a normalized 100 point scale allows it to remain consistent (by adjusting the factor) even as companies add/remove categories and items.

If you want to jump directly to the system first and then come back and read the text, click here.

The scoring for each item follows a simple but strict 3-level scale of 0 (below baseline), 1 (at baseline) or 2 (better than baseline). There are no fractional “in between” scores. For example, you must not score someone 1.5. You must pick either 1 or 2. This 3-options-only scale is meant to minimize vagueness. For the same reason, a wider scoring range like 1 to 5 (commonly seen in star rating systems) is not used. A score of 0 in an item is not neccessarily bad. If you are not seeing at least a few 0 scores for most employees, you have set your baselines for each item too low.

The baseline for each item is the same for everyone from the programmer-apprentice to the VP of Engineering. The baseline level — i.e. what quality of performance in that item rates a score of 1 — must be defined in advance for each item as unambiguously as possible. This can be done by senior management or by management consultants hired for this purpose. Doing this in consultation with the employees (who are to be rated) and clients/stakeholders is recommended.

The resulting total score is meant to be mapped to the employee’s level of seniority/rank for title and compensation. That means within a job functional area, employees at senior levels should score higher than employees at junior levels.

For example, a score of 81-100 could map to director/VP levels; 61-80 manager; 41-60 engineer/contributor; 21-40 junior level/apprentice. Since different functional areas — for example, software engineering and quality assurance testing — may have different pay scales, this score maps directly to rank/title, and those are mapped to salaries corresponding to the functional areas’ market rates.

You will notice that a lot of emphasis is given to leadership and management qualities. This is designed for the system to work across the wide range of skills from intern to VP. At first, this may seem like the system is unfairly skewed in favor of seniority and higher level employees. The system, however, is designed to favor skills and better level of performance in multiple areas.

The first four categories are described below. The fifth category is defined as discretionary/user-defined. CAREER-CLEAR is designed to be used in the real world, in a diversity of organizations and on a regular basis. The system won’t succeed if it is too rigid. On the other hand, the system must meet its goals of being fair, consistent and constructive for all employees. To accomodate and balance these goals, 20% of the criteria is meant to be user-defined at descretion of the manager within the fair, consistent and constructive guidelines.

It is inspired by systems described to be in use at Microsoft, Construx, FogCreek (Joel on Software) and Conde Nast Digital Technology. The latter was developed by Bobby Chowdhury, Brian Murphy, Janet Kasdan and Rajiv Pant.

The 5 categories are: Caliber, Leadership, Expertise, Role and Discretionary.

Caliber

This section measures the talent of the employee in general (non-technical) areas.

Scoring: Above Average=2, Average=1, Below Average=0. Add the score for each of the heuristics. Max Score=10 points.

1. Ownership – Has identifiable long-term ownership of projects. This is a measure of the criticality, complexity and / or number of projects the employee has ownership in.
2. Responsibility – Is consistently reliable in terms of deliverables and time.
3. Communication – Communicates effectively with peers and other colleagues. Listens to and understands others’ viewpoints, challenges, needs and desires.
4. Consistency – Is approachable, predictable, receptive and consistently applies good judgment in all interpersonal interactions in the work place.
5. Innovative – Innovates and stays abreast of emerging technologies and finds ways to incorporate those technologies into systems.

Leadership

This section evaluates the positive influence the employee has on others.

Scoring: Above Average=2, Average=1, Below Average=0. Add the score for each of the heuristics. Max Score=10 points.

1. Teacher, Coach & Motivator – Mentors others, makes great use of all information sharing tools available and is an active presenter. Rallies the troops and improves morale.
2. Enabler – Empowers and enables others to succeed.
3. Exemplary – Leads by example and goes above and beyond the ‘requirements’.
4. Maturity & Humility – Embraces others’ solutions, even when incompatible with one’s own. Incorporates feedback from others to find the best solutions.
5. Connector – Has familiarity with the ecosystem beyond one’s own projects. Functions as a hub which others are drawn to for a quick answer or a quick redirect towards an answer.

Expertise

This section quantifies the skills and experience of the employee related to the job function.

Scoring: Above Average=2, Average=1, Below Average=0. Add the score for each of the heuristics. Max Score=10 points.

1. Fundamentals – Understands of the core technical concepts aligned with the given job function. This may include data structures & algorithms, testing, networking, etc.
2. Breadth of Expertise – Is a subject matter expert and go-to person for many areas of technology.
3. Pragmatic – Has a demonstrated ability to identify the best solution to balance what’s most theoretically ideal against what might be the most practical due to concerns about security, scalability, time to market pressures and cost.
4. Automator – Consistently works to drive improvement in processes and systems.
5. “Boy/Girl Scout Rule” – Leaves code and systems better off than they found them.

Role

This section enumerates the employee’s role and areas of contribution within the organization and beyond.

Scoring: Above Average=2, Average=1, Below Average=0. Add the score for each of the heuristics. Max Score=10 points.

1. Strategic – Provides sound vision for broad, long-term goals.
2. Tactical – Oversees many projects or activities that move the organization towards strategic goals.
3. Operational – Steers day-to-day processes that achieve the tactical goals.
4. Executional – Implements repetitive tasks that make up the operational processes. A measure of quantity and more importantly, quality of work produced.
5. Industry Recognition – Is recognized externally as a leading technologist through contributions to open source projects, blogging, writing books, participating in technical committees, speaking at conferences, etc.

The following are some examples to illustrate strategic, tactical, operational and executional.

• Strategic: “Our new Web application will become one of the top three, preferably #1, in its space in the US market.”
• Tactical: “We will hire a small team to develop and launch it. An office location would be required to meet partners and clients. We will also need additional funding.”
• Operational: “We will hire a great software architect, 2 expert engineers, set up office in Manhattan, and have goal of reaching $500,000 in additional funding by the end of the year.”
• Executional: “The architect designs the Web application in collaboration with the engineers. The engineers and the architect implement it. The team then makes it live and markets it via social networks and other channels.

Discretionary

Please be sure to adhere to the goals of being fair, consistent and constructive for all employees in using this discretionary section. This category is not meant to be used to justify favoritism nor meant to be arbitrary. Good descretion comes from rational, reasonable and relevant criteria. Place items here that are not already covered in other categories and are important to your organization. A good rule of thumb is that you must be able to justify any criteria you apply here.

Scoring: Above Average=2, Average=1, Below Average=0. Add the score for each of the heuristics. Max Score=10 points.

1. discretionary / user-defined item 1
2. discretionary / user-defined item 2
3. discretionary / user-defined item 3
4. discretionary / user-defined item 4
5. discretionary / user-defined item 5

CAREER-CLEAR version 2.1 2010-Oct-13

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1. Providing reliability, scalability & good performance
2. Minimizing risks via security, privacy, regulatory compliance and reduction of vulnerability to potential lawsuits
3. Reducing and controlling costs

This guide is meant to help you review upcoming contracts as well as existing services.

Likely audience for this article: Managers, directors and vice presidents of technology, operations or finance at organizations operating large-scale Web sites; Executives supervising technology: CTO, CIO, CFO, COO.

Seven Aspects of Large-Scale Web Hosting

Large-scale Web hosting infrastructure and services can be organized into the following seven areas:

1. Servers & Environments
2. Network & Other Appliances
3. Managed Hosting Services
4. Third-party Provided Services
5. Program Management Office, PMO
6. Account Management
7. Infrastructure & Facilities

Checklist for Review

You can use the following checklist to review your hosting services or a vendor’s proposal.

What to look for

When you review each item below, consider:

• Is this item included in the vendor’s proposal or in the services we are currently receiving? If it is not included, what are the good reasons it isn’t included?
• Is this needed for my organization’s current business requirements? Can we do without it? Is it a must have or nice to have for present and reasonable future needs?
• What are the alternatives?
• What is the unit price of this item? How does the price scale up as needs grow? How does the price scale down when need for this item decreases?
• What level of fault-tolerance does this item need? i.e. redundancy, standby backups, time to recover

Some of the above review questions may apply only to things and not apply to services and processes.

Servers

Servers may be physical hardware servers and/or virtual servers managed using software such as VMWare, Parallels Virtuozzo or Xen. The services listed below can each run on separate servers or multiple services can run on a server. It is generally better to have servers running only one (or minimum number) of the major services listed below. That reduces complexity and saves expensive staff time saved maintaining, troubleshooting and recovering. Virtualization makes it economical to have multiple virtual servers on the shared physical hardware economize costs.

The following is a list of commonly found services at large-scale Web sites that require servers.

• Web
  • HTTP(S) Content Delivery. E.g. Apache HTTP Server software
  • Streaming Content Delivery
  • Cache. E.g. to run products like Squid Cache, memcached
• Application
  • Content Management software. This is the software that the Editorial and Production teams use to submit, edit, package and manage articles, photos and other Web site content
  • Dynamic Content Assembly. Typically done using Portal Server software, either third-party supplied or in-house developed
  • Data Processing. E.g. workflow engines, jobs/tasks processing servers
  • Middleware
  • Other applications. These are applications that happen to be separate from the main content management system. They could be separate for any number of reasons. E.g. blogs, forums
• Database
  • Relational Databases. E.g. Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL
  • Non-Relational Data Stores. E.g. Key-value, NoSQL stores

Server Environments

An environment is a self-sufficient set of servers assigned to serve a purpose as described below. Large-scale Web sites typically utilize multiple environments.

• Production
  • This serves the Web sites to the customers and public.
  • Typically has 99.9% or higher uptime guarantee in the Service Level Agreement
• Staging
  • This is the environment where content packages are developed, integrated and previewed by Editorial, Design and Production teams before they are published to the end-users. For example, when working on a major site redesign or relaunch for several months. Since the tech teams are often making changes to the Development Integration and QA environments, they are not suitable for content integration work by the Editorial and Design teams. Staging is used in large-scale Web sites where mutiple Editors, Designers and Production staff are collaboratively creating content packages and new sections. In smaller Web sites or in cases where just one or two Editors are working on a piece of content like an individual article, previewing is done in the Production environment itself with access controls.

• Quality Assurance (QA)
  • The QA engineers perform Functional Testing and Load Testing here. Doing functional testing while a load test is running is sometimes a good idea as it simulates usage closer to live production.
• Development Integration
  • Software product code developed by different engineers is integrated here. There could be continuous integration or nightly builds.
  • This is where developers ensure that their code works with other developers’ code (does not break the build, and does not conflict resulting in undesired functionality)
  • Programmers should ensure that the product works here before handing it off to the QA engineers for testing

In a virtualized system the environments may not be physically separate and may regularly grow and shrink at different times. For example when hosted at a cloud computing provider, the QA environment may scale up during load testing and shut down completely during the hours the QA team is not working.

Network & Other Appliances

These are devices to which various servers are directly or indirectly connected.

• Routers
• Load Balancers
• Firewalls
• Shared Storage (Storage Area Network, SAN; Network Attached Storage, NAS)
• Backup & Restore systems
• Bandwidth (at origin hosting)
  • Bandwidth is not a physical thing, but since like electricity, fuel or cell-phone minutes, is something that is metered and paid for monthly, bandwidth usage and charges need to be carefully managed.

Managed Hosting Services

• Systems Administration
  • This typically includes all the management of the physical hardware up to and including the operating system and popular applications that complement the operating system.
• Database Administration Services
• Applications Management Services
  • This typically includes all the administration of the applications that run on top of the operating system.
• Systems Monitoring, Alerting & Reporting
• Web Support Help Desk, 24×7

Third-party Services

• Content Delivery Network, CDN (e.g. Akamai, Limelight, CDNetworks)
  • CDN Network Storage
  • CDN Bandwidth Rates for HTTP and Streaming
• External Monitoring, Alerting & Reporting (e.g. Gomez, Keynote)

Program Management Office, PMO

• Project Management
  • PM people, organization, processes
  • Collaborative project management tools, e.g. JIRA, RallyDev, Mingle
  • Shared documentation management tools, e.g. Wiki
• Change Management Processes & Tools
  • Documentation system
  • Tools for source control, build & deployment
• RASIC Matrix Describing Roles & Responsibilities
• Escalation Flowcharts
• Crisis Management & Emergency Procedures

Account Management

• Customer service
• Relationship management
• Master Services Agreement, MSA
• Statements of Work, SOW
• Service Level Agreement, SLA
  • What to look for in the SLA is the subject of a separate article in this series.
• Billing
  • Monthly bills provided by telecommunications (telco) and hosting companies tend be extremely complex and lengthy. As a result, they are difficult and time-consuming to review.

Infrastructure & Facilities

This item, infrastructure & facilities, is beyond the scope of this article. It includes the buildings, electric power, generators, climate control, physical security and related staffing.

This article is part of a series titled “Guide for the CTO: A compilation of articles on how to lead and manage technologies, projects and people”.

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These are not meant to be comprehensive step-by-step, ordered project plans with task dependencies. These are checklists in the style of those used in other industries like Aviation and Surgery where complex projects need to be performed. Their goal is get the known tasks covered so that you can spend your energies on any unexpected ones. To learn more about the practice of using checklists in complex projects, I recommend the book Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande.

Your project manager should adapt them for your project. If you are not familiar with some of the technical terms below, don’t worry: Your engineers will understand them.

Pre-Cutover Migration Checklist

The pre-cutover checklist should not contain any tasks that “set the ship on sail”, i.e. you should be able to complete the pre-cutover tasks, pausing and adjusting where needed without worry that there is no turning back.

• Set up communications and collaboration
  • Introduce migration team members to each other by name and role
  • Set up email lists and/or blog for communications
  • Ensure that appropriate business stakeholders, customers and technical partners and vendors are in the communications. (E.g. CDN, third-party ASP)
• Communicate via email and/or blog
  • Migration plan and schedule
  • Any special instructions, FYI, especially any disruptions like publishing freezes
  • Who to contact if they find issues
  • Why this migration is being done
• Design maintenance message pages, if required
• Setup transition DNS entries
• Set up any redirects, if needed
• Make CDN configuration changes, if needed
• Check that monitoring is in place and update if needed
  • Internal systems monitoring
  • External (e.g. Keynote, Gomez)
• Create data/content migration plan/checklist
  • Databases
  • Content in file systems
  • Multimedia (photos, videos)
  • Data that may not transfer over and needs to be rebuilt at new environment (e.g. Search-engine indexes, database indexes, database statistics)
• Export and import initial content into new environment
• Install base software and platforms at new environment
• Install your Web applications at new environment
• Compare configurations at old environments with configurations at new environments
• Do QA testing of Web applications at new environment using transition DNS names
• Review rollback plan to check that it will actually work if needed.
  • Test parts of it, where practical
• Lower production DNS TTL for switchover

During-Cutover Migration Checklist

• Communicate that migration cutover is starting
• Data/content migration
  • Import/refresh delta content
  • Rebuild any data required at new environment (e.g. Search-engine indexes, database indexes, database statistics)
• Activate Web applications at new environment
• Do QA testing of Web applications at new environment
• Communicate
  • Communicate any publishing freezes and other disruptions
  • Activate maintenance message pages if applicable
• Switch DNS to point Web application to new hosting environment
• Communicate
  • Disable maintenance message pages if applicable
  • When publishing freezes and any disruptions are over
  • Communicate that the Web application is ready for QA testing in production.
• Flush CDN content cache, if needed
• Do QA testing of the Web application in production
  • From the private network
  • From the public Internet
• Communicate
  • The QA testing at the new hosting location’s production environment has passed
  • Any changes for accessing tools at the new hosting location
• Confirm that DNS changes have propagated to the Internet

Post-Cutover Migration Checklist

• Cleanup
  • Remove any temporary redirects that are no longer needed
  • Remove temporary DNS entries that are no longer needed
  • Revert any CDN configuration changes that are no longer needed
  • Flush CDN content cache, if needed
• Check that incoming traffic to old hosting environment has faded away down to zero
• Check that traffic numbers at new hosting location don’t show any significant change from old hosting location
  • Soon after launch
  • A few days after launch
• Check monitoring
  • Internal systems monitoring
  • External (e.g. Keynote, Gomez)
• Increase DNS TTL settings back to normal
• Archive all required data from old environment into economical long-term storage (e.g. tape)
• Decommission old hosting environment
• Communicate
  • Project completion status
  • Any remaining items and next steps
  • Any changes to support at new hosting environment

The checklists are also published on the RevolutionCloud book Web site at www.revolutioncloud.com/2010/01/checklists-migration/ and on the Checklists Wiki Web site at www.checklistnow.org/wiki/IT_Web_Application_Migration

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My entire career working for media companies, I’ve held firm the belief that the uptime, reliability, performance, scalability, performance and security of commercial Web sites is of paramount importance. When sites that I’ve been responsible for have had issues, my colleagues and I have given our personal time and energy to resolution. With my teams, I spend considerable time on proactive measures. I’ve had the honor of working closely with and learning from some who do an excellent job running technology operations.

Experience has taught that things can and sometimes do go wrong. Sometimes calculated risks don’t pan out. Sometimes mistakes cause problems. We are human. We should strive for perfection; we can get close to it, but not fully attain it. We should be prepared for such scenarios. When they happen, we should work diligently and expeditiously on resolution and have frequent and honest communications with stakeholders and customers. Such communications during the incident should include:

Update 2010-Jan-24: This checklist is now maintained on the Checklists Wiki Web site at:

www.checklistnow.org/wiki/IT_Incident_Reporting

During-Incident Communication Checklist

• Current status
• What is the full impact?
• Estimated time to resolution
• Any recommended workarounds until resolution, if practical
• Assurance that it is being worked on
  • It often helps to mention who all are working on it and what they are doing

The post-incident communications to stakeholders and customers should include:

Post-Incident Communication Checklist

• Summary
• What happened, how and why it happened?
  • Including full description of all impact
  • Do not blame² third-parties or say things like “beyond our control”. A technology leader takes responsibility equally for both insourced and outsourced products and services.³
• How it was resolved
  • If the resolution is temporary or long-term
• Next steps
• Plan for eliminating or minimizing this and similar incidents from happening again
• Thank all those who helped resolve and the customers for their understanding
• Mention the monetary credits you plan to give as per the Service Level Agreement (SLA)
  • Specify any additional ‘make goods’ or returns you plan to make to the customers above and beyond the credits as per SLA, if appropriate.

Stakeholders and customers here refer to internal customers of the technology operations team (e.g. the concerned folks in editorial, marketing, sales, finance, legal and other departments). External communications to the public Internet should be handled in consultation with legal and public relations.

S3′s outage (or any outage) isn’t to be taken lightly, but I have faith Amazon and their customers will learn from it.

Disclaimers:

• As explained in the terms of use of this site, any opinions expressed on my personal Web site do not reflect those of any employer, past or present. My Web site and I in my personal life neither represent nor speak for any corporation.
• I have no affiliation, financial or otherwise with Amazon.com. I happen to be a user of their products and services, some of which I like and some that I don’t.
• Personal Web sites like this are exempt from the performance requirements of corporate Web sites :-) My personal Web site is for expressing, learning and R&D. It also happens to be hosted on Amazon EC2 and S3.

1. Silicon Alley Insider and ValleyWag have amusing spins on it. :-)
2. There may be extreme instances, especially when criminal activity or malicious wrongdoing was the cause where it would be appropriate to blame someone.
3. It is ok to mention service providers, or describing external events for explaining what happened, but don’t do it in a “it was their fault, not ours” tone. The technology leader should factually describe what happened and take responsibility.

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Document Revision 2.2 2001/07/20

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