Question

this is a workplace skill assignment.

You have been promoted to Evening Team Lead at a data center. You have reviewed the current infrastructure to ensure that operational procedures, maintenance and support of critical systems are in place.   

You feel you have a well-trained, responsible staff in place and are confident that they are providing high quality operational support. If you could do anything, you would add more support staff to the team. Although you are getting by, you often run in to a shortage of coverage. Team members regularly voices their concerns to you about their ability to accomplish the workload.

Being understaffed is great in terms of the departmental budget. You have also heard it can be difficult to get new positions approved. You decide your team can handle the hectic pace and put off exploring the need for additional personnel with your supervisor. Next year’s budget, you tell yourself.

On Monday night, the data center goes offline. Your team follows the recovery protocol but finds that the data restore fails. After some investigation, you determine that James was assigned to complete nightly backups but has not been doing so for the last six months. The data is lost.

Your next step has to be to take this to your supervisor. How do handle responsibility for this problem with your boss?

Answer 1

I wouldn't jump the gun and put all the blame on james.The reason why james hasn't been been doing his job has to be determined.It should also be looked into as how james is performing at his other works,if he is handling it.there might also be issues of being understaffed , which maybe putting an extra load on the employees.Thus being understaffed can be a reason for the mismanagement.And it should be determined why the data backups weren't monitored periodically and reported .from the looks of it ,it seems as a mismanagement due to understaffing and negligence of the employee.The whole situation assessed must be reported to the supervisor as it is along with stressing for additional staffs and proper monitoring for avoiding such issues in the future.(james's actions should be also considered and if in case he was found to be knowingly negligent,he should be punished accordingly and warned against such repetiotions).