- [Instructor] Welcome back.
Okay, it's time to go to work.
Chris Cross, Global Bank International's
newly appointed chief information security officer,
has been tasked with building
an internal security operations center.
Chris knows that staffing an internal team
is going to be a heavy lift.
He recently delivered a presentation on the initiative
and loved our ideas around ensuring the roles are defined
with a pipeline mentality in mind.
So he asked us to provide more detail
by defining one of the roles on the team.
Take a look at this list of responsibilities
for a SOC analyst he sent over.
This is a great starting point but will need some work
before it's ready for primetime.
If you recall from the previous video,
when Audrey decided to open up her candidate pool
to more junior talent, the first thing she did was list
the day-to-day responsibilities of her cake designers.
Then she separated the low-risk tasks with the intent
to align those responsibilities to a junior baker.
We'll take a similar approach with this list
but with a bit of a twist.
In order to help Chris solve staffing challenges
in an easy to understand and repeatable fashion,
we'll use the LEADERS framework to build the list out a bit
and help us get some definition around the various roles
on the team.
To be clear, the LEADERS framework is nothing fancy,
certainly not worth writing a book about.
It's simply a seven-step framework I developed
to help define skill levels within specific job roles.
Let's dig in.
Step one, which is already done,
is to list the top five to 10 responsibilities of the role.
Once that's done,
we need to establish our evaluation criteria.
Due to the demanding nature of the SOC function
within an organization's cybersecurity program,
a few options that come to mind
are level of criticality, risk to the organization,
and, let's say, training requirements.
This is by no means an exhaustive set of criteria,
but it does serve as a good baseline that you can
continue to expand and improve upon as you become
more familiar with the framework and make adjustments
according to the needs of your specific team.
Next, assess the responsibilities in the list
against the evaluation criteria.
The table displayed shows a sample outcome of this process.
As you can see, I've chosen a very basic, three-level
high, medium, and low ranking system which, again,
you can modify if necessary to meet the needs of your team.
Perhaps a numbered system of one through five, for example,
if a three-level system feels limited.
Of course, no two organizations are the same,
so results will vary based on things
like prioritization and risk tolerance.
Once you've completed the initial assessment, you may find
that some of the items in your list are too broad,
requiring you to rank them at a level
that is higher or lower than you may like.
To address this, the next two steps in the framework
are to determine which items may be a bit too broad,
then expand them into additional sub-items as necessary.
The table shown highlights the additional granularity
achieved by expanding the first task,
which can of course be done for other tasks as well.
Once you've done this, you'll repeat the assessment
and modify your rankings as needed.
The final step in this exercise is to specify
which responsibilities most appropriately align
to each skill level.
The decisions made in this step are based on the outcome
of the assessment against the evaluation criteria
as well as a level of responsibility
you're comfortable assigning to a junior resource.
For example, is the decision
to only assign low-ranking tasks?
Is low to medium ever okay?
Ultimately, these decisions are judgment calls,
so unfortunately I don't have a magic formula to offer.
But, hey, these are the challenges
we live for as leaders, right?
Maybe.
Oh, one other thing I wanted to point out
is that although this course is focused
on creating opportunities for entry level talent,
this framework can be used as a starting point
to segregate duties at the mid and senior levels also.
Well, looks like we've successfully made room
for some entry level talent.
Well done.
Hopefully, Chris will give us some positive feedback.
Let's go to the next video and see what he has to say.