Document to Nathan Elder, the president of your company, who is a micro-manager and

likes to know everything that is going on

SCENARIO You are the technical manager of a large Internet design firm (100+ employees). One of your primary responsibilities is to manage a team of developers. Your unit’s primary goal is to build and deliver custom web applications and to update client websites. About 8 months ago you hired a small start-up company, MaintainU, to perform routine maintenance for clients’ websites because you needed to focus more attention on the custom applications. MaintainU does not interact with your clients, and they work as sub-contractors through your company. Your clients are not aware of this move and for now, you and Nathan Elder, your company president, want to keep it this way. One of the tasks you have assigned to MaintainU is keeping website security certificates, or Secure Socket Layer (SSL) certificates, up to date. Unlike some services that renew automatically until specifically canceled, SSL Certificates have a set expiry date. These certificates authenticate a website’s identity and enable an encrypted connection. Companies and organizations need to add SSL certificates to their websites to secure online transactions and keep customer information private and secure. Yesterday, you received an angry call from a client, Sheila Links at Gateway Industries, because users of the company website were getting error messages stating that the SSL certificate was expired and the content could not be trusted. You immediately got in touch with Jason Hughes, the president of MaintainU, to inform him of the problem. Jason and his team were able to update the certificate, but there remains work to be done. Gateway Industries was one of the first clients your firm ever signed. While you were able to get the mistake corrected, this penetration in security is a major transgression and has compromised the client’s faith in the company. Further, for the first 6 months or so, the relationship with MaintainU was great, but this error is a serious breach in security. At this point, you’re uncertain if you want to continue the relationship, but at the same time, you cannot afford to bring maintenance work back in-house. You have to reestablish productive working relationships on several fronts.

DELIVERABLES

• Document to the client, Gateway Industries • Document to MaintainU • Document to Nathan Elder, the president of your company, who is a micro-manager and

likes to know everything that is going on