You should get and scan through all docs available.
Discover as much information as possible about the DC that you can discover safely.
It will indeed be invaluable if you can get and understand docs for all existing operations and equipment in the DC. Realize the risk of documentation: it may be outdated or wrong, sometimes. Ideally you should figure out how accurate is, get discrepancies fixed. Figure out any details of the infrastructure you need to know about.
As operations manager, I suspect you should be working with people who manage equipment in the DC day to day, or have their specific administrative functions they are responsible for... you did say it was a big company, I assume you won't be _personally_ doing all operations work, but continuing to delegate tasks much like the previous OP manager probably would have been.
You probably want to meet with everyone and get an idea of what they do, the dynamics of your team, what responsibilities different people have, etc, etc.
Finding any policies and procedures for operations are important, as is how they're practiced. And any obligations of DC Operations to report or consult with upper management under various circumstances...
Once you have discovered all available information about DC operations, you need to make sure there aren't holes in what should be in place.
For example, you'll want to check the docs and have various surveys or audits of the networks and servers done, probably, if the documentation isn't good, especially.
You should get it verified, for example, that proper backups are done on all servers, that nothing has slipped through the cracks under the former DC op manager's watch.
i.e. Once basic info discovery is complete, you'll want to validate that operations and basic protections and good DC management, maintenance, change control, security, auditing, and accountability practices have been implemented properly, or if not, that they will be done
And re-check things like disaster recovery plans... they may be outdated, for example.
Depending on the size of the organization, DR planning and DR plan maintenance might be your job, or it might be more of a 'global operations manager' overseeing that, if, for ex.. there are multiple datacenters, each with a separate DC ops manager.
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by: MaerosPosted on 2009-11-08 at 16:28:26ID: 25772727
Definitely ask the person you are replacing with every scrap of documentation they have available. Everything from policies, to documented configurations and passwords, to service accounts and the like. Everything you can get your hands on.
Do you have experience working with this company, or did you recently come in from the outside? The first few weeks you should have two main goals in mind:
1) Get familiar with as much as you can.
2) Keep operations going, and try not to re-invent or change anything drastically until you are more comfortably familiar.