Lab 5 - Human Resources & Financial Issues

I couldn't have thought of a better way to end this class than with the learning lessons we delivered in this last lab assignment regarding human resources management and financial management of GIS programs and GIS projects. See below for brief sypnoses.

On Human Resources

From absolute scratch, I had to write a job description and a recruitment plan for a given case study. I decided on "Enterprise GIS Administrator" for the job title, and "Geospatial and Information Technology" for the Department. Other sections of my job description included: General Job Description; Essential Job Functions; Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities (KSA's); Education and Experience; Preferred Education and Experience; Benefits; and Base Salary.

For my recruitment plan, I provided great detail on: how to lure potential employees; needed soft-skills and hard-skills for the job; where I would advertise the job position; the number and style of interviews I would conduct; and how much involvement I would anticipate my other staff to have in the process.

Also, I had to put my management skills to the test by writing-out a conversation with a hypothetical employee in regards to managing conflict between staff members.

On Financial Issues

From the scenario of being a GIS Manager on a team that is in charge of obtaining Landsat imagery data, geoprocessing it, and serving it within a GIS viewer for a client, I had to develop a data storage and distribution budget over a one-year life cycle on a cloud solution of my choosing and base it on the potential costs, given what is know about the scenario project.

I created the table below to facilitate my understanding of the current costs and possible future costs by dataset size, and number of times downloaded a year (365/16 days=roughly 22 times), and assuming that from this year on forth, historical data would be kept (so basically showing two years).

Also, some questions I asked myself (and make assumptions to, as a private entity working for multiple clients) were:

1. How many clients will use this cloud solution?

2. Are workloads likely to be scheduled or unpredictable?

3. How urgent are our computing needs?

4. Do we want to pay hourly for the instance the cloud server is used?

5. Do we plan to you this service for at least 3-4 years?

6. Does it matter what we pay upfront? How badly do want to save money upfront? And can we even pay for money upfront?