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I've been trying to get my 3-man IT team on the same page on how to prioritize things. I think I got the idea from @rands on analyzing whether a request is done because of pain, or failure. In a nutshell: Pain: user can get job done, but with pain. This can be because they've got to do an elaborate workaround, or things are slow, or the system is just unfriendly. Failure: user can't get job done, because system is down, access is not right, or whatever. This is pretty self-explanatory, I think. This brings it around to a basic rule of thumb: take care of failures before pains, but pains that go on for an extended period of time need to be taken care of before the user's pain becomes more than just a technical problem. Of course, that's super vague and open to interpretation, but that's the grey area that the IT team should be talking about frequently. Does this make any sense? What's your (or your team's) logic when trying to figure out what to do now versus what to do later?
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Mar 17, 2014 18:26
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Alfajor posted:Does this make any sense? What's your (or your team's) logic when trying to figure out what to do now versus what to do later? How much money is this costing the enterprise, and how much time will it take to fix it? Sometimes you have to make exceptions because executives get huffy (but luckily they usually just want to know that someone, anyone is paying attention to them so you can send someone you may not miss), but for the most part never forget that IT is just there to facilitate whatever it is your organization is doing and your priorities should revolve around those objectives.
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Mar 17, 2014 18:40
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Alfajor posted:Does this make any sense? What's your (or your team's) logic when trying to figure out what to do now versus what to do later? Tom Limoncelli's Time Management for System Administrators has a whole chapter about this. The book rules, is cheap (especially on Kindle) and will take you a weekend to plow through. Everyone should own this. But to summarize, he broadly agrees with you. Prioritize projects that have the greatest impact on the organization and your users. Don't rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic by doing fun little projects while poo poo like the SAN crashing twice a month or devs needing to wait 2 weeks to get a VM provisioned are going on. Another way of looking at this is the Theory of Constraints from the business management (  ) world. Out of all the things you could possibly work on, only a couple are materially holding the business back from working more efficiently and making more money. Work on those projects. Speeding the operation up anywhere else is a waste of time because any improvement before the bottleneck just means more work piles up at the bottleneck faster, or you're speeding up work after the bottleneck where it is already just barely trickling out and easily handled anyway.Limoncelli also points out that you can also optimize other teams' perception of IT by handling requests in an intelligent order. Recabling a rack and resetting a password will take the same total amount of time no matter which order you do them in. But if you do the reset right away, then go do the invisible busy work, people will think you're responsive, helpful and awesome rather than a smelly neckbeard with no regard for customer service. The work took the same amount of time, but you got a better result.
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Mar 17, 2014 18:54
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AreWeDrunkYet posted:How much money is this costing the enterprise, and how much time will it take to fix it? Sometimes you have to make exceptions because executives get huffy (but luckily they usually just want to know that someone, anyone is paying attention to them so you can send someone you may not miss), but for the most part never forget that IT is just there to facilitate whatever it is your organization is doing and your priorities should revolve around those objectives.
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Mar 17, 2014 19:13
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Uhh, even if you aren't getting all the financials reporting to you, common sense thinking can pretty easily help you decide "Problem X is costing the company more than Problem Y." You don't have to be able to put penny-precise dollar figures on it.
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Mar 17, 2014 19:34
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Misogynist posted:I always hated this quantitative line of thinking, because a non-stakeholder trying to estimate the business impact of anything beyond a complete business standstill is the equivalent of Google asking a developer candidate how many marbles fit inside a school bus. Every book and every methodology teaching problem management and risk management, including the ITIL corpus, trots out the "how much is this costing the business?" line, and nobody knows, least of all some IT middle-manager who probably has no background in finance or business of any kind. Yes, an effective manager will be aligning the department's goals with the stated goals of the business, and will prioritize effectively among business units. But doing this quantitatively, with any kind of accuracy, means that you're prioritizing business units that are profit centers over business units that are cost centers. IT, as a cost center in almost every organization, should see right away how stupid this is. You're absolutely right, but that really only applies to edge cases. Usually aligning yourself with business needs is fairly obvious - for example, is a revenue-generating website down? Get on that poo poo. Now. Printer jams can be cleared later. Or for something less obvious, if you are considering two projects of similar complexity, you can usually at least estimate the scope of the impact. I am in no way suggesting you break out spreadsheets and models to make business decisions as an IT manager who has not been tasked with that, but people seem to make decisions for all sorts of nonsense reasons (who hasn't seen a project a manager thought was "cool"?). Just getting IT people into the mindset of understanding that they exist to make the rest of the business run more efficiently is often a surprisingly large step up from whatever was happening before.
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Mar 17, 2014 19:39
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What are some good reads related to high end storage systems/concepts/theories/etc, specifically EMC? The new position I've taken is storage heavy and I want to really get all my ducks in perfect order. I have already picked up "Information Storage and Management" published by EMC and I am plowing through it. Are there any other good ones?
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Mar 17, 2014 19:45
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And the general idea is that you should be focusing on the problems that have a meaningful impact on the day to day operations of the organization and section that which you work on. User(s) can't work is much more important (In the perception of the company and managers of it) than 'Cosmetic rearrangement' of something that only you see.
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Mar 17, 2014 19:47
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Syano posted:What are some good reads related to high end storage systems/concepts/theories/etc, specifically EMC? The new position I've taken is storage heavy and I want to really get all my ducks in perfect order. I have already picked up "Information Storage and Management" published by EMC and I am plowing through it. Are there any other good ones? That's the only one I ever found online in book form that looked any good. I think they have some online training courses and videos but I never sprang for them myself and don't know how good they are.
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Mar 17, 2014 20:38
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Docjowles posted:Tom Limoncelli's Time Management for System Administrators has a whole chapter about this. The book rules, is cheap (especially on Kindle) and will take you a weekend to plow through. Everyone should own this. I have this book! It's on my to-read pile, but apparently I've already learned everything by osmosis  I agree that it's pretty common sense, and I'm trying to spread this common sense in as many way ways of explaining it as possible. I'm learning that the best way to get everyone on the same page is to be very verbose and explicit about what my expectations are, so thanks all for your input 
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Mar 17, 2014 23:20
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AlternateAccount posted:Uhh, even if you aren't getting all the financials reporting to you, common sense thinking can pretty easily help you decide "Problem X is costing the company more than Problem Y." You don't have to be able to put penny-precise dollar figures on it. For a more moderate example: a performance problem is causing employees to receive external emails thirty minutes late. At the same time, the VP of Product Development can't access her mailbox at all. Which problem do you troubleshoot first? What's the cost of each of these issues? Obviously you need to consider the business priorities and make judgments about what order to resolve them, but "how much does this cost the company?" is a hilariously reductionist way to do it. It's pseudo-science wearing a horse-head mask labeled "Methodology." Vulture Culture fucked around with this message at 23:32 on Mar 17, 2014 |
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Mar 17, 2014 23:29
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I think a lot of that comes down to culture. In all the examples you posted, the answer seems blazingly clear to me. But quite frankly, if I am in a business that's such a cockup that these are choices I am routinely expected to make AND my knee-jerk instinctive responses are somehow routinely wrong, I need a new job.
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Mar 17, 2014 23:45
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Managing expectations is a pretty important part of IT. A lot of times the users don't really know or care what is wrong or why it is wrong, but give them a little attention so they feel like they know what is going on. It would be faster to just work on the problems and start getting stuff working, but its better for everyone if you "waste" some time just talking to people, and sometimes you find out information about the problem you wouldn't have otherwise. Or you can have an awesome manager that can do all of this for you. It leaves a lot more leeway to work on things in the order you choose too.
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Mar 18, 2014 00:19
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Syano posted:What are some good reads related to high end storage systems/concepts/theories/etc, specifically EMC? The new position I've taken is storage heavy and I want to really get all my ducks in perfect order. I have already picked up "Information Storage and Management" published by EMC and I am plowing through it. Are there any other good ones? The ISMv2 book is where it is at. (Information Storage and Management: Storing, Managing, and Protecting Digital Information in Classic, Virtualized, and Cloud Environments Second Edition just to make sure you have the latest copy) EMC also has some other very nice training. Some of it is free on their education portal...All of the VNXe sessions I watched were free. Some of it costs a metric fuckton. We got 3 DVD's of ILT training when we bought our VNX5500 and retail on those was something like 9,000 dollars or something. I just took an hour long intro to RecoverPoint presentation last week for free. Luckily one of the DVD's we got was for RecoverPoint since the full 40hr class for it is 3K. We're probably buying another big VNX this year, I'll press my boss into getting them to throw in more training. quote:Managing expectations is a pretty important part of IT. So loving true, so true. People are for the most part very understanding when they feel they're informed about a situation.
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Mar 18, 2014 06:13
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When I was still doing a lot of desktop, I usually tried to educate users a bit about the cause and solution to the problem. Obviously some were better than others about understanding/giving a gently caress, but I felt it helped a lot of them understand the complexity (and sometimes the simplicity) of what was happening.
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Mar 18, 2014 09:25
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I try to at least give users an overview of what's going on since so much of IT just looks like "sitting around staring at a screen" otherwise. I actually quoted Sy Syms an a job interview when they asked my thoughts on customer service and dealing with clients. But, if I show up and I get told (often literally) "just fix it" and they want to watch over my shoulder and offer commentary, then I will not be happy.
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Mar 18, 2014 14:17
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Day 2 of being an IT Consultant: Spent yesterday acclimating to my current project, which is helping a large publishing company with its Exchange/messaging services. Yesterday was a bit of benign neglect -- given a pile of old documentation without much context. A fair bit of it is unnecessary, I don't need to know how to do a lot of the things here, I just need to know any particular policies & procedures within which I need to work. Prospects for today: sifting through more documentation and doing my best to contain my shock at some of the things I see around here. Oh the exciting life I lead. Edit: From where I'm situated, I can hear the helpdesk of this company chattering away behind me. I'll have to start keeping track of some of their choicest quotes; they're not the brightest crayons in the box. wintermuteCF fucked around with this message at 14:28 on Mar 18, 2014 |
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Mar 18, 2014 14:19
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skipdogg posted:People are for the most part very understanding when they feel they're informed about a situation. This is not at all limited to IT. It's just generally Good Business.
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Mar 18, 2014 14:40
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wintermuteCF posted:Edit: From where I'm situated, I can hear the helpdesk of this company chattering away behind me. I'll have to start keeping track of some of their choicest quotes; they're not the brightest crayons in the box. Please do. I actually find it funnier listening to people who think they're smart talk rather than hearing people who aren't bright talk at this point.
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Mar 18, 2014 15:05
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SA Goons, help me with my life. I'm 27 with a BS in chemistry and I work in construction sales. I hate it. I've had a hobbyist relationship with Linux and systems administration since I was a teenager and kind of regret never pursuing it as a career. I'm at the point in my current job that I'm ready to jump ship and try my hand at IT. My main worry is having to take a significant pay cut to start at the bottom of the ladder again at a help desk. I plan on taking my RHCSA soon and I feel very confident that I will pass it. I have experience "playing" with computers that I can turn into experience "working" with computers on a resume. I've looked online to get a general feel for salary ranges in the Bay Area, but I'm never sure if those are accurate. Can anyone shed some light on what my experience might be if I attempt this switch? Would I have trouble getting an entry level position without a CS degree or formal experience of some sort? What would the pay actually be like? Thanks for any help anyone is willing to provide.
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Mar 18, 2014 16:52
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Tigren posted:SA Goons, help me with my life. You may or may not have trouble getting your foot in the door. It all depends on how you can sell yourself. In the Bay Area you'll probably be up against several dozen other candidates for each position who also like to computer in their free time, so focusing on "I know Linux" or "I can set up a web server" won't get you as far as you'd like. RHCSA might not hurt but it would look odd for a person with zero industry experience applying for a help desk. When you tailor your resume for the help desk positions, focus on critical thinking, learning ability, customer service, meeting deadlines, and other soft stuff like that. Anyone can learn how to reset user accounts in AD, but a lot of people gently caress up basic things like time management or working well on a team. In my experience, salary sites like Glassdoor and Salary.com have been reasonably accurate. Don't lay them out as hard numbers, but definitely keep the ranges in mind when you start receiving offers. Good luck, keep us posted!
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Mar 18, 2014 17:38
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Tigren posted:I have experience "playing" with computers that I can turn into experience "working" with computers on a resume. I also want to say that no, you cannot. At least not in any way which is plausible to a competent interviewer. And getting called on it (which you will) will reflect badly on you. Write a cover letter explaining your situation. Go to user's groups and meetups to network and try to get an opportunity with less competition. Do not move to the Bay unless you already live there (hard for you to get a liveable wage at this skill level, hard for you to get work at this skill level, extremely competitive job market).
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Mar 18, 2014 18:17
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evol262 posted:I also want to say that no, you cannot. At least not in any way which is plausible to a competent interviewer. And getting called on it (which you will) will reflect badly on you. Thanks for the thoughts. I already live here, (un)fortunately for me. Cover letter/networking sounds like the right idea.
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Mar 18, 2014 18:33
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Tigren posted:Thanks for the thoughts. I would say that not embellishing a little bit is a mistake. Take your experience as a salesman and understand that selling yourself is much like selling the products you have been tasked to sell. Sometimes you have to twist the truth just enough to make the sale. Someone who can pass RHCSA is going to be a useful employee with a bare minimum of effort in a linux based environment at the entry level. Do you have a good attitude? Do you have a presentable appearance? Have you lived in the bay area already for a decent length of time? Congrats, you are probably going to find something. Let employers make the decision on if you will work with them in the future.
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Mar 18, 2014 18:43
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Tigren posted:SA Goons, help me with my life. I was in a similar boat to you a few years ago, except replace construction sales with teaching abroad - what I did was go to back to (community) college online and study networking, routing, all that jazz (basically the networking technology program at stanly.edu, which has been brought up in this thread before) while doing my day job. I got lucky in that I landed a help desk position for about six months that was a really late shift so I could roll in and do that at nights/on the weekends for experience, but if you have a local community college, lots of them have co-op agreements with local businesses to help students get work experience so that they're at least reasonably prepared for what's ahead post-graduation. The access to college job boards helps a lot as well since often smaller businesses will post their vacancies straight to those, which is incidentally how I found my current gig. Sheep fucked around with this message at 18:59 on Mar 18, 2014 |
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Mar 18, 2014 18:57
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Tigren posted:My main worry is having to take a significant pay cut to start at the bottom of the ladder again at a help desk. quote:I've looked online to get a general feel for salary ranges in the Bay Area, but I'm never sure if those are accurate. Can anyone shed some light on what my experience might be if I attempt this switch? Would I have trouble getting an entry level position without a CS degree or formal experience of some sort? What would the pay actually be like? Thanks for any help anyone is willing to provide. Honestly go to a Linux User group(I know the bay area has them), talk with some people tell them your story, that you want to pursue linux as a full time profession see what they can ballpark. User groups are a great way to find out what the local markert is asking for and offering in the way of positions and price ranges. You can use Payscale(might have to sign up) which can offer you some insight into payment of linux gigs. It may be a bit difficult getting into the field but social networking is a powerful tool that can open many, many doors. oh evol stated the same thing I did well you get the point. Dilbert As FUCK fucked around with this message at 19:42 on Mar 18, 2014 |
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Mar 18, 2014 19:39
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Sickening posted:I would say that not embellishing a little bit is a mistake. Take your experience as a salesman and understand that selling yourself is much like selling the products you have been tasked to sell. Sometimes you have to twist the truth just enough to make the sale. The problem with this is that "playing around with computers -> working with computers on your resume" means that someone's going to ask you questions that you're totally incapable of answering. Inasmuch as this should happen in every interview, it rapidly becomes obvious that the shade-tree admin has no experience in anything remotely resembling a business environment or dealing with multiple servers. Everyone has to sell a bit. That's what the interview is. But there's a limit to how far you can stretch or twist it before it just becomes dishonest.
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Mar 18, 2014 19:39
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 !!I got a call about the position with the university today, they offered and I accepted! I will start April 7th. I'm waiting to give my 2 weeks to the bank on Friday, as we've got an IT audit going on this week and I don't want that hanging over everyone's heads. Been a long time coming, I cannot wait to get out of here and onto that sweet sweet government teat
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Mar 18, 2014 20:08
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CloFan posted:
Congrats dude! related note; I finally got my start date after an amass(like a month or so) of confusion.
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Mar 18, 2014 20:10
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CloFan posted:
You moved from a bank to a university. Please don't make your next job healthcare. I don't think your mental state can take it.
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Mar 18, 2014 20:21
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So, I start my new job on Monday, and I'll be flying up Saturday... and I've come to the realization that the laptop bag I've had for the last few years is a piece of poo poo and I really need something sturdier. Anyone have any suggestions for something that will survive an airplane, and some travel around NYC? Not too worried about cost so long as it's not ridiculous. Needs to be something I can order off Amazon and have by Friday, or grab at some ubiquitous store or another, and my laptop is 15". Any recommendations?
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Mar 18, 2014 21:54
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I liked my Timbuk2, kept my laptop safe for some banging around in college. As long as you don't choose a garish color scheme, it should be fine, and it's proved to be pretty indestructible so far.
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Mar 18, 2014 22:14
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I am currently rocking an Everki Swift. Had it for 3 years maybe. Holding up pretty well. I recently just started looking at a CaseLogic 14" guy (I am a fan of smaller bags). I would also advise a Grid-It. I am in love with mine.
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Mar 18, 2014 22:19
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Malkar posted:So, I start my new job on Monday, and I'll be flying up Saturday... and I've come to the realization that the laptop bag I've had for the last few years is a piece of poo poo and I really need something sturdier. Anyone have any suggestions for something that will survive an airplane, and some travel around NYC? Not too worried about cost so long as it's not ridiculous. Needs to be something I can order off Amazon and have by Friday, or grab at some ubiquitous store or another, and my laptop is 15". Any recommendations?
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Mar 18, 2014 22:45
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I bought a Paukma from Amazon about 8 months ago and haven't really been what I'd describe as rough with it, and it's already falling to pieces. Yeah Amazon will replace it forever but I really can't be arsed with shipping it back to them on an annual basis and being without a bag while they send a new one. Prior to that I had a dirt cheap Jansport bag with an Incase sleeve for my MacBook which was a combo that was at least 8 years old, and I treated it like poo poo and it never really started to look worn out at any point. I'm disappointed with the Pakuma especially as it's a £40 bag and the cheap one I had before was probably less than half the price.
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Mar 18, 2014 22:56
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Malkar posted:So, I start my new job on Monday, and I'll be flying up Saturday... and I've come to the realization that the laptop bag I've had for the last few years is a piece of poo poo and I really need something sturdier. Anyone have any suggestions for something that will survive an airplane, and some travel around NYC? Not too worried about cost so long as it's not ridiculous. Needs to be something I can order off Amazon and have by Friday, or grab at some ubiquitous store or another, and my laptop is 15". Any recommendations? A few years ago I got sick of carrying generic Dell bags or childish looking backpacks and splurged and got a nice Tumi laptop bag. I've had it probably 4 years now and it looks brand new still. I picked mine up at one of their outlet stores for less than half off list price. It was still almost 200 dollars, but I would spend it again. Quality stuff.
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Mar 18, 2014 23:18
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Malkar posted:So, I start my new job on Monday, and I'll be flying up Saturday... and I've come to the realization that the laptop bag I've had for the last few years is a piece of poo poo and I really need something sturdier. Anyone have any suggestions for something that will survive an airplane, and some travel around NYC? Not too worried about cost so long as it's not ridiculous. Needs to be something I can order off Amazon and have by Friday, or grab at some ubiquitous store or another, and my laptop is 15". Any recommendations? I have a Crumpler "The Considerable embarassment" which works great with my 15" macbook pro. For extra hipster points though I kinda want to get a bag from Freitag.
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Mar 19, 2014 00:05
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luminalflux posted:For extra hipster points though I kinda want to get a bag from Freitag.
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Mar 19, 2014 02:26
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Sickening posted:You moved from a bank to a university. Please don't make your next job healthcare. I don't think your mental state can take it. So far it's been University-->Bank-->University... I know better than to touch healthcare with a 10-foot pole.
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Mar 19, 2014 02:58
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CloFan posted:So far it's been University-->Bank-->University... I know better than to touch healthcare with a 10-foot pole. Speaking as a guy who worked for a University, that history still looks like a cry for help to me. 
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Mar 19, 2014 03:09
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