The Design Team

Similar in purpose to the assessment team, the design team will likely include some or all members of the assessment team. The design team will be more concerned with detailing specific functions of the migration ”AD, hardware configuration, name resolution, infrastructure, security, replication topology, client services, system administration, and network services ”all of which are topics that need to be covered to plan a migration to AD. These people need to have the 30,000-foot view, but be able to work at the 10- foot level or have resources to advise them on that level. For instance, the Domain Name Server (DNS) design must be conducted by someone technical who understands the overall DNS structure of the company and who understands how DNS is implemented in Windows 2003 to tie the two together and take advantage of new Windows 2003 DNS features (such as conditional forwarding). The details, of course, can be provided by other technical people if needed.

One company, Reed Elsevier, a large global publishing company profiled in Appendix A, "Case Studies," of this book, divided its design team into five positions . These individuals could add staff as needed and approved by upper management. Their functions were defined as follows . I have simplified their duties to avoid company-specific structures. The percentages shown are what percent of the individual's time is dedicated to a particular function. So 50% management means that 50% of this person's time would be spent in management tasks .

• Project manager (50% management, 50% steering) : This person is often referred to as the Management Sponsor. Microsoft has always recommended this position on the design team, and HP has recommended it as a best practice. This person ensures business objectives are met, serves as a liaison between the design team members and upper management, and makes key decisions that move the project along. Obviously, this person must have proper authority in the business organization to make these decisions.

• Chief architect (75% design and development, 25% implementation and support) : This position is responsible for top-level architectural and technical design, including configuration, hierarchical organization, and services. This person directs the implementation of the design and works with the system architect to ensure feasibility of the design. He or she reports to the project manager and coordinates the design with the systems architect.

• Systems architect (75% design and development, 25% implementation and support) : The systems architect is responsible for implementation of the test environment and pilots to ensure success of the design in the production environment. This person defines technical configurations and standards as well as administrative policies.

• Senior systems/process engineer (50% support, 25% administration, 25% design and development) : This individual maintains configuration, change, release, incident, problem, and service level processes. Responsibilities include support services such as the help desk and technical support teams for low-and medium-priority problems, and expediting support for high-priority problems. They ensure that the design team complies with policies and procedures, and provide assistance to the systems engineer. In addition, the senior systems/process engineer maintains statistics and performance benchmarks and administers a technical database relating to the design.

• Senior systems engineer (50% administration, 25% support, 25% design and development) : This position assumes the roles of enterprise Admin, root domain Admin, root DNS Admin, schema Admin, and top-level Organizational Unit (OU) and Audit Admin, and is responsible for high-level implementation, monitoring, and maintenance of Directory Services (DS). The senior systems engineer is also responsible for delegation of authority at the domain and OU levels, and provides support to help desk and technical support teams.

In all the AD designs I've been involved with, I've never seen two companies organize their design team the same way. I like this approach because of its simplicity and ease of organization. All of the design, implementation, pilot, and support functions are assigned to five individuals, who then are responsible for employing others as needed. This model could apply to a company of any size . Smaller companies might have only five individuals on the whole team. Large companies would have a deeper staffed organization under these five people, thus providing flexibility to fit any need. Note that the senior systems engineer is the one who initially holds all the key Admin roles, such as Enterprise Admin, just to get things started, and then he delegates from there. Once established, the design team must organize the design functions that will be examined in the following sections. First, let's look at the logical design.