UC Berkeley Year 2000 Information Departmental and Personal Computers: Find and Resolve Y2K Problems
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Organizing Your Department to Address Y2K Computer Problems

The goal: protecting your department's key functions Go

1. Create a Y2K Project and assign resources to it Go
1.1. Form a project Go
1.2. Assign overall responsibility for the project Go
1.3. Assign staff to the project Go
1.4. Join campus mailing lists for peer-to-peer Y2K help Go
1.5. Identify computers eligible for Y2K services through annual subscriptions Go
1.6. Consider whether to "contract out" some of your work Go
1.7. Delegate appropriate tasks to your staff & faculty Go
2. Inventory your hardware & software Go
2.1. Identify what inventory data you'll need Go
2.2. Select tools to help you gather inventory data Go
2.3. Start early Go
2.4. Anticipate challenges in obtaining access to some computers Go
3. Prioritize which computers to work on first Go
3.1. Set priorities Go
3.2. Decide what giving a computer "priority" means for your departmental efforts Go
3.3. (Optional) Communicate to your department which computers are being given priority and why Go
Related documents
Prioritizing: Identifying Your Critical Computers & Software Go

The goal: protecting your department's key functions

The goal of addressing Y2K problems on your departmental computers is to manage and minimize the risk posed by these problems to your department's mission, and hence to the overall instructional, research, and administrative business of the UC Berkeley campus.

To achieve this goal, you'll need to identify and prioritize Go your department's mission-critical (or "key") functions which are dependent on your departmental computers, and make sure these functions are protected from disruption due to Y2K problems.

To protect your key departmental functions, you'll need to find Y2K problems on the computers which are critical to these functions and:

Why achieving 100% Y2K "compliance" is not your goal

The goal of fixing all of your department's Y2K computer problems, thus achieving 100% Y2K compliance on all of your computers, is widely regarded as unattainable."

As Chris Weiss stated in a February 1999 interview with Government Computer News, in the article Mainframes are easier to fix than LANs Go:

The PC ... is an uncontrolled [multilayered] environment where nothing is responsible for [the Y2K compliance of] all the layers at once. ... There's no single technology that can make all five layers compliant and make them work together. ... Risk management and prioritization help define what's critical and noncritical. In the time we have left, that's all we can do.

1. Create a Y2K Project and assign resources to it

[ ] 1.1. Form a project

Consider tackling the Y2K problem within your department as a special - and very important - project.

If your department already has experience organizing some of its members into project teams or workgroups, you may be able to use the same processes when establishing and managing your Y2K project. You'll need to designate one or more project leader(s) and to assign staff resources to the project's work.

The entire project team should understand that its goal Go - and hence the measure for determining the project's success - is ensuring that your department's key, mission-critical functions are not disrupted by Y2K problems.

[ ] 1.2. Assign overall responsibility for the project

Your department should designate one (or more) project leader(s). Your project leader(s) will have overall responsibility for making sure that the work of finding and resolving Y2K problems on your departmental computers is carried out successfully.

Typically, the project leader(s) will work with and provide status reports to your department's unit head and/or Management Services Officer (MSO).

[ ] 1.3. Assign staff to the project

Depending on the number of computers in your department, you may need to assign additional staff to the project, in addition to your project leader(s). Typically, these staff would include employees with computer expertise, as well as employees who have a good understanding of your department's business functions. If your department has "in-house" computer support staff, one or more of these staff may be among the logical candidates for participation in your department's Y2K project.

Since work to find and resolve Y2K problems can potentially be extensive and time-consuming, you may need to put on hold - or reassign - some portion of these members' current duties in order to free a sufficient fraction of their time for Y2K work.

When considering how to allocate staff time to this project, you might start by considering the Giga Group consulting firm's rough estimate that finding and resolving Y2K problems on a single PC will take at least two hours when extensively using automated software tools, and potentially up to four to six hours when using more manually-intensive methods. If your department has 40 PCs, you might thus need 80 to 240 hours, or the equivalent of one to three people working half-time for a month, to tackle their Y2K problems. (These are averages: finding and resolving Y2K problems on certain computers may require much less time, while other computers presenting more complicated situations may require more time.)

[ ] 1.4. Join campus mailing lists for peer-to-peer Y2K help

Your project manager(s) and the project's additional staff participants should consider immediately joining one or more campus mailing lists which will allow them to share their "real world" experiences in finding and resolving Y2K problems with their peers in other campus departments and units. On these mailing lists, members typically respond to one another's questions and exchange useful tips and resources. In some cases, your staff might also find it beneficial to join certain non-campus Y2K mailing lists.

See Joining Mailing Lists for Peer-to-Peer Y2K Help Go for information on how to join these mailing lists.

[ ] 1.5. Identify computers eligible for Y2K services through your annual subscriptions to campus recharge services

If some of your departmental computers are "subscribed" to the annual maintenance services offered by a campus recharge service Go such as Departmental On-site Computing Support Go (DOCS) or the College of Letters & Sciences L&S Computer Resources Go (LSCR) unit, these computers may be eligible for no-cost Y2K audits and perhaps also for some level of Y2K advice or problem resolution. Check with your recharge service for details.

[ ] 1.6. Consider whether to "contract out" some of your work

If your department does not have sufficient in-house computer support resources available to tackle its Y2K problems, you may need to consider whether to "contract out" some of your work to a campus recharge service Go or to an outside consultant.

Before you do so, it may be helpful to have a clear idea of what work you need to have performed, and which computers you would like your contractor to work on. You might begin by reviewing the overview Go of potential Y2K problems that may affect your department's computers, as well as the prioritization Go suggestions below.

[ ] 1.7. Delegate appropriate tasks to your staff & faculty

In many larger campus departments, your computer support staff, a campus recharge service, and/or outside consultants may perform many or all of the tasks of finding and resolving Y2K problems on your departmental computers. However, you may decide that some of these tasks should be delegated to, or shared with, your staff and faculty. (For this purpose, keep in mind that your "staff" might also encompass some of your student employees.)

Your staff and faculty:

For example, you might have your computer support staff, campus recharge service, or outside consultants find and resolve the more technically straightforward Y2K problems affecting hardware and operating systems. They might then work closely - perhaps on an appointment basis - with your staff and faculty who perform key departmental functions to find and resolve the more complex Y2K problems on their computers which may involve custom and off-the-shelf applications, data files, and data sharing methods.

In certain instances, you could decide to delegate some of this more complex, higher-level work outright to certain staff and faculty members. For example, a faculty member or graduate student who works with specialized statistical, mathematical, data analysis, or modelling applications might be best equipped to find and resolve Y2K problems within their own applications and data files, once they have been provided with detailed information about how to do so. You could even decide to delegate such responsibilities across the board to faculty engaged in scientific research, who may be most suited to address specialized problems which may affect the application programs and data used in their laboratories.

Similarly, an administrative staff member who is a spreadsheet "power user" might be the person best qualified to find and resolve Y2K problems in their own spreadsheet data files, which might include custom functions, macros, or scripts they've written. In a hypothetical situation where these spreadsheet files are vital to your department's key functions, you may wish to work closely with this staff member to see that they're provided with one or more automated software tools that can assist them in identifying potential problems, as well as to arrange for whatever documentation or training they might require to use these tools effectively.

If you are in a smaller department or unit which lacks dedicated computer support staff, and which does not have the funding required to pay for recharge services or outside consultants, you might decide that it is necessary to have your staff and faculty perform all of the work of finding and resolving Y2K problems on their own. If so, you might begin by suggesting that they follow the Y2K readiness checklists provided on this Web site. If they encounter unexpected problems or have unanswered, important questions, you might consider engaging a member of a campus recharge service or an outside consultant for a brief consultation. Of course, make sure that whomever you hire has the ability to assist you with your department's specific needs.

In any approach where you've delegated some (or even all) of the tasks involved in finding and resolving Y2K problems on your departmental computers to your staff and faculty, you will need to establish a mechanism to monitor the status of their work.

If certain delegated work is absolutely critical to key departmental functions - which include research and instructional, as well as administrative, functions - you may also wish to arrange to have that work independently validated and tested by your departmental computer support staff or by outside consultants.

Why your department's staff and faculty are vital to your efforts

Here's one example of how the subject matter expertise of your department's staff and faculty can prove vital to your Y2K project efforts:

Imagine that your department's computer support staff or your hired consultants have used an automated software tool to scan the hundreds or thousands of spreadsheets on your department's computers to identify potential date-related problems. The tool reports that cell C29 in a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet file MODEL399.XLS contains the date "08/09/41" stored as text. Your tool recommends correcting this date to specify an unambiguous four-digit year.

Without the active participation of the staff or faculty member who created and/or maintained this spreadsheet, how would you know whether this date should be corrected to 08/09/1941 or 08/09/2041? If someone else - rather than the spreadsheet's author - makes this correction, there's a fair chance they'll get it wrong.

At a higher level, you may also first need input from the spreadsheet's author or maintainer in deciding whether this document is critical to some element of your department's business, and whether it's even worth spending time and effort fixing. Without their assistance, you might have to resort to guesswork. For instance, you could look for a recent modification date that suggests that this file has been used recently ... but what if it happens to be an older, less recently-accessed spreadsheet containing critical research data or important financial data from a prior year?

2. Inventory your hardware & software

In order to know what you'll need to work on, you'll first need to know what you have. This may sound like a truism, but as the quotes below indicate, conducting an inventory can often uncover surprises.

Taking inventory can often uncover surprises

Roderick Jones, Director, The TRUST Group, asserted in a posting to the year2000-discuss@year2000.com mailing list on November 3, 1998 that:
IT [Information Technology] managers don't generally know how many PCs they have, nor who does what with them.
Tim Wilson wrote in his November 30, 1998 Internet Week article How Many Desktops, Again? Go:
After reviewing data from about 150 audits of corporate assets over the past three years, Micropath [an asset management tools vendor] found that IT managers underestimated the number of workstations in their environments by an average of 32 percent, [the firm's President, Bill] Holder said.

[ ] 2.1. Identify what inventory data you'll need

When conducting your inventory, the types of details you'll likely need to gather will include:

[ ] 2.2. Select tools to help you gather inventory data

Unless you have just a few computers, the task of performing an inventory by hand can be daunting. We suggest that you consider using software tools Go that can scan your computers and gather data for you about their installed hardware and software.

Most of these tools are available for industry-standard PCs, but a few are also available for other types of computers, such as Macintoshes. Some no-cost tools are available, and depending on your department's needs, these free tools might in some circumstances be adequate.

Commercial tools generally offer more capabilities than no-cost tools. For instance, some commercial tools can identify specific types of data files (such as spreadsheets and database files) which you may wish to check for potential Y2K problems, while few, if any, no-cost tools will report on data files.

Many commercial tools also allow you to gather inventory data over a network. This feature may enable you to update and maintain your inventories over time without having to repeatedly visit each of your department's computers. The aggregating and reporting features typically built into these commercial tools may also help you obtain many useful high-level views of your department's computer assets.

[ ] 2.3. Start early

You may need to start conducting your inventory early to make sure that you leave sufficient time to prioritize and resolve Y2K problems before the end of calendar year 1999. Based on experiences shared by members of other organizations that have conducted inventories of their PCs, an inventory in a large department could potentially take weeks or even months to complete.

[ ] 2.4. Anticipate challenges in obtaining access to some computers

In many situations, you (or other members of your department to whom you might have delegated this task) may need to physically visit each computer that you'll be inventorying, at least on one occasion.

This is because you might either need to physically run some software on these computers that will help you gather inventory data, or you might need to install some special software or instructions, such as "agent" or "responder" software or login scripts, that will then allow you to query these computers for their inventory data over a network. (With some software tools Go, it might be possible for your departmental staff and faculty to run or install such software or instructions themselves, without your physically having to visit their computers.)

Some of the 'real world' challenges you might face when walking around your department to conduct an inventory are computers that are:

Make sure that you inventory all of your computers, not just those which are sitting in plain sight on staff and faculty desks. Your department might have server computers tucked away in closets, underneath desks, or in special 'machine rooms'; computers which are shared by several staff; computers at "service desks" or in other public service locations; and laptops which can be checked out for home or fieldwork/conference use.

3. Prioritize which computers to work on first

If your department has many computers, you should decide which to work on first.

[ ] 3.1. Set priorities

Your unit head and/or Management Services Officer (MSO), together with your Y2K project manager(s), will need to decide how to prioritize work on your department's computers. Your inventory data, as well as input from departmental staff and faculty, will likely prove tremendously useful when performing this task.

When setting priorities, we highly encourage you review the two documents below:

[ ] 3.2. Decide what giving a computer "priority" means for your departmental efforts

Once your department has identified which of its computers are to be given priority status, you'll then need to decide what this means for your departmental Y2K efforts. The following are two representative examples of approaches you might take to focus your efforts on these key computers:

  1. In the first example, all critical Y2K problems would be addressed first on your computers with priority status.

    These computers would be checked and their Y2K problems resolved at every layer from bottom to top, beginning with hardware and operating systems, and proceeding up through critical custom and off-the-shelf applications, data files, and data sharing methods. (Non-critical applications and data, even on these key computers, might not need to be addressed.)

    Only after these computers have had their critical Y2K problems resolved would you then turn your attention to the other computers within your department.

  2. A second approach would be to resolve all lower-level (hardware and OS) Y2K problems on every computer within your department, then resolve the higher-level problems - affecting application programs and data - on your computers with priority status.

    In this approach, you would start by conducting a "sweep" across all of your department's computers to find and resolve Y2K problems affecting their hardware and operating systems. You might be able to achieve some efficiencies in allocating your computing support staff's time if you first resolve such lower-level problems throughout your entire department. Also, some campus recharge services Go may be able to do this work for your department on a fee basis.

    After this work has been completed, you would then focus your work exclusively on your priority computers, finding and resolving their remaining - and typically most critical - Y2K problems which may affect their custom and off-the-shelf applications, data files, and data sharing methods. (If you choose or adapt this approach, it is essential that you reserve sufficient time for tackling these higher-level Y2K problems, which can frequently be complex and time-consuming.)

    If you then have any staff resources and time remaining, you could turn your attention to finding and resolving these higher-level problems on the other computers within your department.

With either of the two representative approaches above, you might also consider the option of delegating the task of finding and resolving some or all of the Y2K problems which may affect your other, non-priority status computers to the individual staff and faculty who work with those computers.

Priority status should extend into the year 2000. For example, any unexpected problems encountered on your department's key computers should be resolved first, before taking time to resolve less critical problems. You might even suggest that computers without priority status be turned off over the century transition - and perhaps even left off during at least the first several days of January 2000 - to help protect your computer support staff from unnecessary distractions during that important period.

[ ] 3.3. (Optional) Communicate to your department which computers are being given priority and why

In order to ensure your efforts stay focused on your key priorities, your department's unit head, MSO, and/or Y2K project manager(s) might consider communicating to your entire department, or to the affected units or workgroups, which computers were given priority, how this status was assigned, and what this means for your departmental Y2K efforts.

Here's one representative example of a priority statement which might be applicable in at least a few situations:

"The work that (many of) you perform on your computer(s) is vital to the department (or to the campus or the world). However, the primary software you use - for word processing when writing and editing analytical, instructional, or research documents; exchanging electronic mail with colleagues; preparing graphic illustrations; searching library catalogs; and/or conducting research by browsing the World Wide Web - is unlikely to experience critical failures when the year 2000 arrives."

"We're focusing our departmental Y2K effort on computers which perform key departmental functions and which may have a high risk of experiencing date-related failures. If you are aware of of any computers in this category we may have overlooked, please let us know as soon as possible."



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This site is provided by the campus Year 2000 Departmental Computers and Administrative Equipment Subcommittee at the University of California, Berkeley.

Copyright 1999 by the Regents of the University of California.
Disclaimer: The University assumes no liability if the information on this page is used for other than University purposes.