We have created a full time employee position for a PLM Business
Administrator who works in a separate Business and System Admin team that
is part development, and part Production support. The Business
Administrator does the following tasks.
1. Conduct regularly scheduled information security audits in which "Data
Owners" review and update approved lists of group members with access to
controlled data.
2. Create and manage our published list of context Data Owners, Data
Delegates (generally managers who work for an Owner tasked with the grunt
work of reviewing and approving access), and Data Approvers (people listed
as the primary and secondary approvers in our automated "PDMLink Access
Request" process that we wrote ourselves).
3. Process "Business Administration Service Requests" in a first in, first
out manner using our incident management system to track requests instead
of our longer, more deliberate software enhancement process. Business
Admin service requests include anything that is in the Business
Administration guides that does not require a server restart, does not
require SQL database updates, and does not require a stand alone java
program to do mass updates. Examples of valid Business Admin Service
Requests include:
A. New Document Types, Attributes, and/or Constraints using the
Type and Attribute Manager
B. New or Updated OIRs
C. New Lifecycle Templates
D. New or Updated Access Control Rules
E. New Contexts
F. New Folders that require subdomains for separate or unusual
access control restrictions
G. Minor workflow changes, such as changing instructions in a
task.
H. Creating Saved Searches and Table Views available to all users
I. New or Updated Profiles
J. etc.
4. Act as our in-house expert on the flow of the change management
workflows. Although our programmers will do any java code changes or make
any complex workflow changes, our Business Administrator is expected to
fully understand our CM workflows including writing UATs and testing CM
workflows during technical upgrades and new M-builds.
5. Act as a back up for our Enterprise Business Process Team of analysts
for training material creation and training delivery during technical
upgrades.
6. Act as a back up for our Production Support and Enterprise Business
Process teams for access control and complex workflow questions and
debugging of problems.
7. Own the content in our automated "PDMLink Access Request" process,
debug problems, and work with our developers to fix problems and make
changes as changes are required based on the creation of new contexts,
object types, etc.
This is a full time job for 1 FTE.
We also currently have 2 System Administrators as employees with different
duties related to environment management, data refreshes, etc.
The System Administrators do the following tasks.
1. Run data conversion tools for major upgrades with PTC assistance.
2. Act as PTC Patch Manager and System Build manager during development of
major upgrades, projects, and M-build deployments
3. Stand up and take down systems for development and test as needed for
major upgrades, projects, and M-build deployments
4. Perform system refreshes, as needed, for major upgrades, projects, and
M-build deployments
5. Work directly with PTC for any tickets related to out of the box
functionality errors
6. Start and Stop all development application servers as needed for major
upgrades, projects, and M-build deployments
7. Manage all bulk indexing and configurations for key word search
8. Manage the set up and configurations of all CAD Workers for publishing
9. Define, document, and give to production support how-to documentation
on the activities, above, so that production support has validated
guidelines for system restarts, CAD Worker set up, etc.
10. Run automated performance tuning and load testing tools tools like PTC
System Monitor, LoadRunner, Jmeter, LinkTuner, etc.
11. Etc.
Al Anderson
Solar Turbines incorporated
