Associate a stakeholder with the information that needs to be collected.

From the stake-holders

From this blog:

Project participants (SMEs / Key Stakeholders) A design project manager has to determine a list of SMEs and project stakeholders who can provide information about the design requirements. This list typically includes:

  • Network administrators
  • Storage administrators
  • Server hardware administrators
  • Operating system administrators
  • Application administrators
  • Security Officer
  • HR representatives
  • C-Level executives (CEO, CTO, CIO,…)
  • Representatives

It is important to lists the people involved in this project and their contact information. This list should include:

  • Name
  • Title
  • Organisation
  • E-Mail address
  • Phone number
  • Reachability

Having contact information available will help to make progress without unnecessary interruption during the design process.

  • Stakeholder = A person with an interest in a project
  • SME = A subject-matter expert is a person who is an expert in a particular area

Utilize customer inventory and assessment data from a current environment to define a baseline state.

From the US BrownBag for Objective 1 slide deck:

5-step-design-process

Analyze customer interview data to explicitly define customer objectives for a conceptual design.

From this blog’s notes, I decided to write them out just to make it easier to read:

Conceptual Design: Focus on achieving goals and requirements

  • Use information from SME/Stakeholder interviews (Scope/Goals/Requirements/assumptions/constraints) and from information gathered in current state analysis
  • Determine entities affected by project (LOB,users,applications, processes, physical machine, etc)
  • Determine how goals map to each entity
  • Design infrastructure that achieves each entity’s goal and requirements but stay within constraints (i.e. where do you need availability, scalability, performance,security and manageability
  • Document with diagrams, tables, and text

From the same pdf, here is an example of a conceptual diagram:

conceptual_diag1

Identify the need for and apply requirements tracking.

From this blog:

Requirement tracking It is important to document all requirements. This could be done in an excel sheet for example. Every single requirement should contain at least a unique number, desciption, timestap, priority and the originator.

Given results of a requirements gathering survey, identify requirements for a conceptual design.

From the above pdf again:

Architectural Analysis: Deeper Dive into current infrastucture Perform 2 activities

  1. Current State Analysis:
    • Gather and analyze information on current servers,storage,network
    • Gather and analyze application and operating system
    • Gather resource consumption data
  2. Envision target state required to meet organizational goals while factoring in requirements, assumptions, and constraints.

Generate a similar conceptual diagram as above. Here is a conceptual diagram from this blog:

another-conceptual-diag

Categorize requirements by infrastructure qualities to prepare for logical design requirements.

From the PDF again:

Logical Design

  • Design includes relationships between all major components of the infrastructure.
  • Considers the conceptual design, constraints, and risks
  • Useful for understanding and evaluating the design of the infrastructure
    • Does it meet the requirements but stay within the constraints?
  • Does NOT include physical details like port assignments, hardware, vendors, IPs, etc
  • illustrate how to arrange infrastructure components
  • don’t get lost in the configuration details
  • be aware of capacity analysis, but include things like LUN sizing, CPU, etc
  • document in diagrams, tables, and text

Here is an example of a logical diagram taken from the pdf:

logical-diagram

I would also suggest to watch the following recordings as well: