I'm having trouble understanding an assignment analyzing a case study. I'm supposed to : Read the case study completely before trying to analyze the issues. This step is important to gain an overall understanding of the problems at hand and those involved. Read the case study a second time identifying the key elements including events to date, the sequence of events, those involved, big and small connections/relationships, and the facts of the issues/problems. Remembering the theories and concepts from your readings and assignments in the first part of the course, start analyzing the case study. Do not just simply describe the problems and/or theories. Instead, analyze them in order to determine issues or ways of doing things differently than presented in the case studies. Make assumptions where needed to fill in any gaps that arise as you analyze the case studies, but be prepared to explain your reasoning in your final documents. Present your analysis of the case including possible solutions to the problems that were not presented in the case study. Evaluate the issues/problems in the written response by considering the advantages and disadvantages of each solution in your opinion and documented expert opinions from additional resources. Be sure to include proper implementation practices for installations and the contingency plan for the case studies. Justify your choices in the written response. Provide your response to the case study in the form of a report. The Case Study should be a minimum 2-3 pages in length, not including any references. Use APA 6th edition style for proper citations. Each Case Study is evaluated against the assignment rubric.
Case study: A small job Recently, a medical website development company we’ll call Quasicom decided to replace all the cables strewn through their hallways with a real network. They contacted a cabling contractor to whom they had been referred. The referring party said the company wouldn’t have to worry about the quality of the contractor’s work. A Quasicom representative asked the contractor to look at the company’s problem and quote a price for installing the network. That contractor took a hands-on approach, so he came down himself to perform the job walk. He talked with Quasicom’s information services (IS) staff to determine the company’s needs and got a written document that detailed where it wanted the network locations and the rack. With such a small network, the contractor didn’t have much calculation to do, so he presented Quasicom with an offer that was accepted. Two days later, after a contract was signed and exchanged, the contractor dispatched a team of two installers to the job site. Neither installer was a supervisor, but the senior member of the crew had enough experience to see that the job was done right. The contractor gave the plans to the crew at the job site, showing them where to put the rack and to run the cables and the wiring configuration to use when punching down the faceplates. He then left them to do the work (he had another job walk-through to do for a much larger customer). Quasicom’s premises were of typical modern office construction—a removable tile drop ceiling provided an easy way to run the cables from one location to another. (It is easy to drop network cables behind the drywall once you know how.) The crew expected no difficulties in installing the cable. The two installers set up several boxes of spooled cable in the location where the rack was to be (in this case, it was not in a telecommunications room but in a server room where all the company’s web hosts were hooked up to the Internet). The plan indicated that the biggest run they had was of eight cables to the eight drops in the front office area, so they set up all eight boxes of cable. Quasicom’s IS staff wanted the patch-panel terminations of the wire to be in room-number order, so the installers marked the ends of the cable and the boxes they came in with indelible black marker. The crew then pulled out the requisite number of feet of cable. (Normally, they would measure it, but in this case they just pulled it down the hall to its approximate drop point and made allowance for going up into the wall and down behind the drywall and added some service-loop extra.) They then used their snips to cut the cable off and marked the other end according to which box it came from. They did the same with four boxes of cable for the quad run back to the back offices. That left two locations, each with a double-jack faceplate, which did not share a run with any other locations. They picked the two boxes that looked like they had just enough cable left in them to pull those runs from, and they drew those cable runs out as well. Now it was time to put the cable up in the ceiling. The crew started by removing a few ceiling tiles so that they had access to the ceiling space. Then they tied the bundle of eight cables to the free end of a ball of twine and tossed the twine through the ceiling to a reasonably central area for all of the front-office drops. They used the twine to pull the cables through and down to that point. They performed the same operation for the
