THE BUSINESS SCHOOL

UNIVERSITY OF JAMMU

COURSE NO. – PSMBTC202

SUBMITTED BY: SUBMITTED TO:

ARUSHI JANDIAL PROF. VERSHA MEHTA
ROLL NO. 16MBA2019
 CERTIFICATE

This is to certify that the assignment submitted by

MS. ARUSHI JANDIAL, submitted to The Business School,
Jammu University, for the award of degree of Master of
Business Administration (MBA) contains the original work done
by her under my supervision and this work has not been
submitted elsewhere for the award of any other degree.
The conduct of the candidate remained satisfactory during this
project.

SUPERVISOR
PROF. VERSHA MEHTA
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

On the very outset of this assignment, I would like to extend my sincere

and heartfelt obligation towards the entire personages who have helped
me in this endeavour. Without their active guidance, help, cooperation
and encouragement, I would not have made headway in the assignment.

I am extremely thankful and pay my gratitude to our faculty MRS.

VERSHA MEHTA for her valuable guidance and support on completion
of this assignment. I extend my gratitude to THE BUSINESS SCHOOL,
JAMMU UNIVERSITY for giving this opportunity.

I also acknowledge with a deep sense of reverence, my gratitude towards

my parents and members of my family, who have always supported me
morally as well as economically. At last but not the least gratitude goes
to my friends who directly or indirectly helped me to complete this
assignmengt.

Thanking You

ARUSHI JANDIAL
PROBLEM STATEMENT

Planning for IT Infrastructure requires understanding of both IT

and business processes. Discuss the statement and identify the
role of manager in planning for overall IT Infrastructure in
organization.

ANSWER
Yes, the planning for IT Infrastructure requires understanding of both IT
and business processes. The lack of any one of the component can result
in the failure of Information System of an organization which would
consequently result in huge loss of money and resources. It can also lead
to complete closure of an organization. the reason behind is that se IT
infrastructure has been associated with significant capital investment as
well as huge ongoing expenses for maintenance and upgrades, thus
planning is critical to ensure cost-effectiveness as well as top service
levels.
IT infrastructure is no longer simply an electronic support system. It’s
become a pervasive, essential component of daily operations and a
foundational factor in determining your firm’s future success. The IT
infrastructure planning process defines and refines IT’s role within your
organization and then identifies what’s needed in the way of equipment,
applications and manpower to fulfil that role.
A smart, strategic plan focuses on solutions that have the potential to
improve service levels while reducing IT operations costs.
Planning looks into the future, anticipating what services your IT
infrastructure will need to support, based on overall business goals and
implementation priorities. But it’s particularly difficult to predict longer-
term needs when technology is changing at lightning-fast speed.
Effective planning supports flexibility, so you can capture new
opportunities that might appear.
The effective IT Infrastructure involves the concept of strategic
planning.
Strategic Planning:- Strategic planning is the process of documenting
and establishing a direction of your small business—by assessing both
where you are and where you’re going. The strategic plan gives you a
place to record your mission, vision, and values, as well as your long-
term goals and the action plans you’ll use to reach them. A well-written
strategic plan can play a pivotal role in your small business’s growth and
success because it tells you and your employees how best to respond to
opportunities and challenges.
Following are the steps involved in Strategic planning:

1. Identify Your Strategic Position

The first stage prepares you for the rest of the strategic planning process.
To achieve your goals, you must first have a clear vision. Start by
defining both your short-term and long-term objectives. In short, what
do you hope to achieve? Next, determine what steps you will take to
accomplish these objectives. When identifying your strategic position,
remember that your goals should be realistic and measurable. For help
with this step, look back to your mission statement, corporate values,
and work culture.

2. Gather People and Information

Once you have established your strategic position, you will want to
bring in the people who will be involved in the planning process. You
will also want to bring in as much up-to-date information to the table as
possible. Ensure that any data you use is accurate so that you make
informed decisions backed up by facts. Once you have people and
information to draw from, examine any internal or external issues that
could possibly affect your objectives. It may be useful to ask other
people in your business for their input, such as employees, customers, or
partners.

3. Perform a SWOT Analysis

SWOT, which is an acronym for strengths, weakness, opportunities, and

threats, acts as a powerful tool during the strategic planning process. A
SWOT analysis is often performed to help identify the strengths and
weaknesses of a business, as well as identify any opportunities and
threats that could arise. Once the team has identified all strengths,
weaknesses, opportunities and threats, you can work together to develop
new goals that will help your business face these possibilities in a more
positive way. A SWOT analysis can also lead you in the right direction
and towards your goals.

4. Formulate a Strategic Plan

Once you have successfully identified your strategic position and have a
set of goals that align with your company’s mission, you can begin
working on your strategic plan. When developing your plan, consider
which initiatives will have the greatest impact on your business and
which will help improve your position the most. Also consider which
initiatives are most urgent and put these at the front of the line. To
ensure that your strategic plan is working, you will need to determine the
best way to measure your progress. With measurable goals you can
visibly see improvements as they happen.

5. Execute Your Strategic Plan

Once you have your strategic plan in place, you are ready to implement
it. This step is the action phase of the strategic planning process. Start by
making everyone involved in the plan aware of your strategy. Ideally,
you want to distribute tasks among different individuals or departments
to prevent one person or group of people from becoming overwhelmed.
Also take the time to check back with these individuals or groups to
ensure that you are staying on track. If you find that you are not meeting
your objectives, make any necessary changes.

6. Constantly Monitor Performance

Your strategic planning process will not be effective unless everyone is

doing their part. This requires you to constantly monitor and manage
performance and tweak any components that are not leading to
satisfactory results. It is also important to hold those involved in the
strategic planning process accountable for their assigned tasks. Know
that it may be necessary to repeat the strategic management process if
any corrective actions you take are not successful. Continue to collect
new and relevant data to help with any future strategic planning that may
occur.
The other important point of understanding the IT infrastructure
planning is the consideration of which approach of planning is to be
followed. The two approaches that are needed to be considered are as
follows:

A.Top-down Approach
In simple terms, a top-down approach is an investment strategy that
selects various sectors or industries and tries to achieve a balance in
an investment portfolio. The top-down approach analyzes the risk by
aggregating the impact of internal operational failures. It measures
the variances in the economic variables that are not explained by the
external macro-economic factors. As such, this approach is simple
and not data-intensive. The top-down approach relies mainly on
historical data. This approach is opposite to bottom-up approach.

B.Bottom-up Approach
A bottom-up approach, on the other hand, is an investment strategy
that depends on the selection of individual stocks. It observes the
performance and management of companies and not general
economic trends. The bottom-up approach analyzes individual risk in
the process by using mathematical models and is thus data-intensive.
This method does not rely on historical data. It is a forward-looking
approach unlike the top-down model, which is backward-looking.

IT infrastructure planning should address everything required to

provide necessary technology services to internal and external
colleagues and customers.

Thus one can not underestimate the fact that IT infrastructure

requires a thorough knowledge of information technology on one
 hand and business process knowledge on the other. The horizon of IT
application has become so broad that every component of business
can be automated and interlinked using servers and connections
hence a firm has to clearly demarcate the processes which it requires
to enable utilizing IT further breaking it into constituent parts to
ensure complete integration of the business process with IT
infrastructure.

ROLE OF MANAGER IN PLANNING FOR

OVERALL IT INFRASTRUCTURE IN AN
ORGANIZATION

The Manager is responsible for the design, installation, maintenance,

and retirement of the systems and personnel that are at the core of an
organization. The services under the responsibility of the Infrastructure
Manager are typically the underpinning (or supporting) services that
enable the delivery of customer-facing IT services.

In more simplistic terms, the Infrastructure Manager is responsible for

everything between the wall jack and the handoff to the internet service
provider.

The roles and responsibilities of manager in IT Infrastructure

planning are enlisted below:

1. TO LOOKAFTER IT DEPARTMENT

IT Infrastructure Managers play a large role in the management of

their company’s IT department as a whole. Almost every task that
IT department personnel engage in, from performing routine
 system updates to installing entirely new elements, will need to be
monitored and guided by the IT Infrastructure Manager.

2. TO RECORD DATA

Part of an IT Infrastructure Manager’s job is making sure that all

relevant data is properly collected and stored. This can include
performance metrics, service levels, server status and both planned
and unplanned system outages. Depending on their company’s
protocol, the IT Infrastructure Manager will need to deliver the
data they’ve collected to higher-level employees on a regular daily,
weekly or monthly basis.

3. TO ESTABLISH AND IMPLEMENT PROCESS AND

PROCEDURES
Perhaps the most important role of the Infrastructure Manager is to
ensure that standards and procedures are in place for the work of
his or her team. Technology infrastructure is inherently complex.
This complexity is best mitigated by establishing standard ways of
work that ensures the technical teams work together in a consistent
manner. Although it may seem the opposite, standard procedures
actually enable the organization to be more agile and more
adaptable to change. Think about it, which sounds like more work
– writing a script to change the configuration on 200 servers, or
manually changing the configuration on 200 servers because each
one was set up in a unique way?

4. TO DEVELOP STARTEGIES

The scope of an IT Infrastructure Manager’s work is not limited to

the inner workings of the IT department. Instead, they must
evaluate the IT department as a component of the company as a
whole. Then, they will be expected to collaborate with colleagues
and department heads in order to develop strategies which will
help the IT department better align itself with the company’s
overall financial and corporate strategy.
5. STAFF MANAGEMENT
The Manager typically oversees three functional areas:

A. Networking – Manage the staff and equipment that handles

switching, routing, and in some cases perimeter devices (firewalls).
Most larger organizations have transitioned the firewalls to being
the responsibility of the security team. In those cases, it is
important that the Infrastructure Manager build a strong
relationship with the security team to ensure smooth infrastructure
service operations. In organizations without a dedicated security
team, the Infrastructure Manager should have at least one person
who has the responsibility for ensuring the IT security of the
organization. In very small organizations this can be the
responsibility of the Infrastructure Manager.
B. Servers – The Infrastructure Manager must have a good
understanding of server technologies. This includes operating
systems, as well as physical and virtual servers. Storage, backups
and disaster recovery are usually the responsibility of the server
team as well.
C. Physical Cabling – Only the largest organizations have internal
teams responsible for physically pulling network cabling.
However, the Infrastructure Manager must be well versed on all
types of physical and fiber optic cabling. I’ve seen situations where
failure to consider data transfer speeds and associated cabling
requirements have been instrumental (and devastating) to server
room and data center projects.

6. VENDOR MANAGEMENT
In most IT organizations, the staff works with external vendors to
support hardware and software. The Infrastructure Manager is
responsible for establishing strong partnerships with those vendors
to set clear expectations. This includes negotiating access
agreements, establishing service level agreements, and ensuring
contracts are in place to support the services provided by the
infrastructure team.
 7. MONITORING AND REPORTING
Without proper metrics and monitoring, this can quickly be the
opinion that senior leadership has of the Infrastructure Manager.
The Infrastructure Manager needs to have a strong monitoring
system in place and be able to produce standard reports on the
status of the infrastructure. Furthermore, the Infrastructure
Manager must regularly communicate what they are doing and
how their work relates to the success of the organization. By doing
this, the Infrastructure Manager can bring visibility into work that
happens ‘behind the scenes’ when compared with the rest of the
organization.
 

IT Infrastructure Manager Skills

IT Infrastructure Managers are tireless leaders, creative thinkers and
technical whizzes. They are able to effortlessly switch between the role
of Manager and the role of Engineer, and they’d rather work overtime
than allow a detail to go overlooked. In addition to these general
personality traits and skills, employers are looking for IT Infrastructure
Managers with the following skills: IT Infrastructure Manager Skills
they are as follows:

 Attention to Detail – When the security and functionality of an

entire IT infrastructure is on the line, you can’t afford to ignore the
little things. Thus, IT Infrastructure Managers need to have a
highly focused attention to detail.
 Extensive Technical Knowledge – IT Infrastructure Managers
need to be intimately familiar with technologies such as Microsoft,
Cisco and VMware. They will also need to have experience with
storage area networks, WAN acceleration, virtualization, firewalls,
routers and more.
 Management Skills – Unlike many other IT professionals, it’s
essential for IT Infrastructure Managers to have excellent people
 skills in order to effectively manage their company’s IT
department.
 Certification – While some employers don’t explicitly require it,
many give preference to IT Infrastructure Managers who are a
Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert, Microsoft Certified Solutions
Expert or Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer or have related
certifications.
 Communication Skills – Stellar communication skills are
necessary for an IT Infrastructure Manager to strategize, plan and
collaborate with both higher- and lower-level colleagues.