You are a oracle DBA and developer working on multiple projects. These are the top 10 tips to successfully manage the expectations on you from various projects.
1.Make the List of top 10 priority things on a sunday evening for the coming week.
2.Make a log of your daily activities in your local desktop or content management system and if required make it accessible to your project managers and colleagues . This will help in easily answering questions from management about where you spent your time.
3.Avoid meetings as much as possible unless your input is required that brings value to your project or the projects of others.If it is not possible to avoid the meeting , take your laptop and work on your priority things.
4.develop scripts for those things that you would have to do regularly – like creating users , increasing tablespace sizes , resetting the passwords , changing profiles etc.
5.Switching from technical activities to process related tasks (filling tickets , ITIL process related tasks) is very expensive. As much as possible try to allocate specific time window for technical tasks and specific time window for process related tasks.
6.Unless you are in a startup , there are already defined procedures, scripts, checklists for most of the DBA activities. Learn about them , get those scripts , documents etc and fine tune them for your purpose. This will save lot of time and you do not have to reinvent the wheel again.
7.Dont argue with business areas verbally even if they are running suboptimal queries and killing your database. Make a nice table with the user session information , the resources they are occupying and the risk to the application and send a mail with IT and business Management in CC. This is much more persuasive as the stability of the database is in the interest of both the business and IT.
8.Make sure that automatic alerts are in place when tablespaces are getting full. This would save time from handling unnecessary tickets. If the alarms are not working for some reason then either fix them or speak with the corresponding operational colleagues to have it fixed. The time spent on this is worth enough so that lot of time is saved from having to spend time in meetings , incident tickets, discussions on justification , blaming etc.
9.Be aware of the DBA related activities , standards , processes in all different projects in your organization. Sometimes quoting the best practices followed by another IT group in your organization is much more effective than trying to quote best practices from a book from oracle or metalink or from some 3rd party. Be ready to discuss both the pros and cons of your approach.
10.Cheerful communication is the key when dealing with different project managers and business areas. Never lose your cool even if you think someone is extremely stupid. Understand that they dont have your experience and perspectives on the database as their core skill could be related to business or management.
Other Info:
Best practices for managing your database performance
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/manageability/dba-best-practices-ow08-129450.pdf
