Who performs workload management

The primary roles most directly responsible for workload management are:
The IT administrator
Is the general IT administrator of all the hardware and software used by the company. He is in charge of installing, supporting, and maintaining servers or other computer systems, and planning for and responding to service outages and other problems.

He installs and maintains the job scheduling tool.

The IBM Workload Scheduler IT administrator
A good deal of his time is focused on keeping job scheduling running smoothly. He rarely does any actual scheduling himself, but instead acts as the person in the background who supports those who do. The IBM Workload Scheduler IT administrator:
  • Defines and maintains the security for the job scheduling tool.
  • On certain occasions does a minimal amount of tuning and customization of the job scheduling tool.
  • Guarantees that the job scheduling tool environments are up and running all of the time, and if something goes wrong he needs to quickly resolve the problem.
  • Monitors the health status of the job scheduling tool infrastructure. Uses tools that alert him (usually via email or pager) and create alerts or automatically open a trouble-ticket to alert the responsible person when there is a problem.
  • Occasionally spends his time helping to fix job scheduling problems that the job schedulers cannot understand.
  • Generates and uses reports.
  • Occasionally documents major problems and work-arounds on the community website.
  • Interacts mainly with fellow team members, programmers, and job schedulers.
  • Sometimes makes suggestions to management about capacity planning and IT software purchases.
The job scheduler
Is the primary actor in workload management and needs to easily create and maintain a plan containing the company workload. He is responsible for modeling the company workload, and for designing, fixing, and maintaining schedules. His main responsibilities are to:
  • Manage workload complexity and dependencies.
  • Optimize schedule efficiency, flexibility, resiliency.
  • Analyze and fix modeling issues.
  • Look proactively for the schedule's integrity.
The scheduling operator
Is responsible for performing all operational processes and procedures, ensuring the business continuity of the workflow. His main responsibilities are to:
  • Monitor critical events and perform first analysis of problems.
  • Manage and coordinate the resolution of issues.
  • Ensure that operations continue.

He is usually not dedicated to monitoring job scheduling alone.

The Scheduling and Operations manager
He:
  • Does not use job scheduling tools himself; but is interested in the operational data from the tools, such as reports on long and late running jobs and service level agreement status.
  • Makes sure his team has the knowledge and tools they need to schedule and manage jobs efficiently.
  • Is always looking for ways to reduce cost in his organization by making his team more efficient.
  • Believes that process is the key to IT management and also thinks that his team’s job scheduling process can be improved. He is familiar with ITUP of which his IT organization has implemented the basic aspects of change management. Consequently, his team follows this process.