AE Hosuing Tutorial

Reorganising the HR function at AE Housing

1a Assume you were a new HR Business Partner responsible for one of the three regions of AE Housing. With reference to the case above, identify two key challenges you may face in ensuring the Director of Housing and the managers are appropriately supported and empowered 
to make decisions; and outline your strategies to address the challenges.

 Key Challenges:There may be some grievances bring up by the manager (comparing the past and present,inter alia, criticizing the new HR arrangement)
-Because the managers see the new HR arrangement has increased their workload, it may be difficult to gain trust with the managers and the Director of Housing
-Resistance to the change in HR arrangement from the manager and the communication may be difficult 

Ways to address the key challenges:
-Delivering tangible change quickly to demonstrate added value 
-Arranging regular meetings with the manager(s)to review HR metrics and give appropriate advice if necessary 
-Providing development plan focused to update the manager(s)in HR knowledge 
-Developing strong, professional relationships with other HR Business Partners 


1b AE Housing has changed the structure of the HR team and assumed the line managers to take up more HR responsibilities related to their subordinates. Identify the potential unintended consequences of such a change and suggest what the HR Director can do to minimize the unintended consequences. 

 Potential unintended consequences:
-Morale of HR team may drop as employees take time to learn new ways of working
-Reputation of the HR team may diminish whilst change is taking place-
 Directors and senior managers may feel the HR service is no longer required/could be outsourced as the managers believe they are doing their work
 -Directors may believe the HR service is no longer sufficiently responsive to business need and not adding value

HR Director should do the followings: 
-HR Director will need to get buy-in from Chief Executive and rest of the Board to ensure consistent messaging to employees
-HR Director will need to communicate consistently and regularly with the business
-HR Director will need to use staff surveys to understand any emerging morale issues and address them swiftly

Operating Systems Questions

Short Question
1.(a)

(i)  Define throughput in the context of operating systems.

(ii)  Name one computing environment that typically desires a high throughput.  

(iii)  Discuss the relation between process preemption and system throughput. 

 

 (b)

Shortest Job First (SJF) is a relatively simple CPU scheduling algorithm.  Consider that there are two busy multi-programming systems A and B. 

The new processes created on System A are mostly long CPU burst processes with only occasional short CPU burst processes.  The new processes created on System B are mostly very short CPU burst processes. 

State whether process starvation is likely to occur on either or both System A and System B.   If process starvation occurs on System A, explain which type of processes is likely to be starved.  Similarly, if process starvation occurs on System B, explain which type of processes is likely to be starved.   Your answer should refer to relevant characteristics of SJF.

2.

(a) Consider a paging system with page size of 32 bytes.  The main memory size is 1024 bytes.  Answer the following questions.

(i) Write down the frame size.

(ii) Calculate the number of frames in the system.

(iii) Given the following page table of a process in the paging system.  Convert the logical address 42 of that process into its corresponding physical address.

Page	Frame	Page	Frame
0	1	3	8
1	3	4	5
2	0	5	2

(iv) Consider that this paging system is supported with demand paging based on the Least Frequently Used (LFU) algorithm.  Your friend suggests that increasing the page size should reduce page fault.  Do you agree?  Justify your answer.

(v) Dynamic loading is a technique for faster program startup and reducing use of main memory.  Comment if dynamic loading can be implemented in a paging system.

(b) Consider the following Resource Allocation Graph (RAG) about a computer system.  Comment on the possibility of deadlock.

(c)

Translation look-aside buffer (TLB) is a component for speeding up page table lookup.  Assume that the TLB access time is 10 ns, the original main memory access time is 60 ns.  If the TLB hit rate is 0.95, calculate the effective memory access time (EMAT).

 Extract from COMPS267F