End of Year Blog Post

  By Jonathan Barwon

Hello to all, my name is Jonathan Dolo Barwon, Head Of IT at New Africa Technology Company. I am about to talk about one of my achievements in 2014 as Head of IT for NATC. We were able to implement many  networking projects for clients such as the Government of Liberia. I will talk about the challenges and how we were successful in implementing one of our projects at the Ministry of Lands, Mines and Energy.   

 The first part of the project entailed networking 2 computer labs and 3 office rooms. We also set up and installed an HP Server with Windows Server 2008R2 as the OS.

The floor plan on how to carry on the work or implement the project was given to us by the IT Department of the Ministry of Lands Mines and Energy. What was meant to be a 2-week project turned into a month-long one.

      I.         Lack of Planning and exchange of information from GOL

The building was a two floor building; we started working on the ground floor, we were at the end of the completion of the ground floor, when the Head of the Project for the Ministry came and said to us that the ground floor will not be used by the Ministry, so there was no need to network the ground floor. We have to disconnect and remove all cable and cables channels from the wall. This took us days to remove all of cables and cables channels from the wall. This was due to lack of planning and communication from the Project Head and the IT Department of the Ministry.

 

     II.         Lack of Power (Electricity)

The lacks of constant electricity at the Ministry was another challenge. Power was only supplied to us from 9:00 AM to 2:00P M and on some days there were no power at all. The reason was, there were shortages of fuel in the country according to the Ministry.

   III.         Working Hours

All of the Government Ministries in Liberia work from 9:00 AM to 3:00 PM, but we needed more hours on site.

How did we complete the Project or achieve our Goal?

In the midst of all of these problems we were able to achieve our goal and objective of the project, by doing the following.

We sat with the Ministry's IT Department and Head of the Project and we redesigned the network Topology. 

NATC Technical team and the Ministry Technical Team were happy with the new Topology.

We also adjusted our time of power usage; all of our drilling was done from 9:00 AM to 2:00 PM every day. With that system we did not have any problems with power.

Because of the power problem a battery backup was setup or installed by NATC to power on the server, switches and two points for 8 to 12 hours if power goes down.  As you can see everything was okay.

As for the working hour, in our meeting with the Ministry Team we requested that the Ministry be open to us for longer working hours.

After all of these steps and arrangements, things became easier for us.

One thing I learned from this work was that lack of planning can lose a lot of time. If you plan well your work can become very easy.

I hope you also learn something from here too.