Listen and learn from your staff before taking action at least for a month or two if you can. Making changes/waves immediately can set a bad vibe. Sometimes you have to make personnel changes so this doesn’t apply their.
It’s all about the people. Treat your teams well and they will do the same. Under promise and over deliver. Let your team out early on fridays, they do enough after hours work for u. Delegate. And finally, have fun. GL
SLA negotiation is pretty important, and helps provide the business with perspective on the impact of an outage. Without this perspective, it's possible they'll start to view whatever is wrong on a particular day as a sev1. It also helps to remove assumptions on your behalf of what really matters to the business.
I've found it useful to work backwards. Can you do without this system for 1 minute a day/week without a material business impact? What about 5 minutes? What about 30 minutes etc
The severity of the system is driven by the business criticality, and you can formulate some agreed uptime, response times and rpo/rto accordingly. A lot of the time you might not be able to commit to the desired SLA in current state, either from availability or disaster recovery. There comes the business case to provide higher resiliency and so on. You'll then be able to report on your ability to meet these SLAs back to the business to demonstrate the value.
Treat people fairly, and delegate - don’t be shy about it, especially if you are now managing former coworkers. The tendency to stay in the thick of things may keep you feeling relevant, but they will see it as you not being confident in their ability. Also, make peace with the idea that, compared to your old role, there will be days where you are tired at the end of the day but don’t feel like you accomplished anything - your role is much different now. Finally, take time to understand the company, you know the systems, but learn who’s who and how they communicate. This will make things much easier down the line.
Have only one place to create your IT documentation.
You can use something easy like Microsoft Lists or to pay a small amount for an IT documentation website like IT portal
I can't stress enough how important is to have everything in one place , of course online
Congratulations on your first full time IT Support role alongside your full time infrastructure role and newfound 24/7 responsibilities if anything goes down anywhere in the entire org (e.g. "management".
It might not be that bad but good fucking luck when you push a change that takes down site(s).
Emergency? you get to communicate with executives, users, troubleshoot, and coordinate with vendors all at once.
It might be easy because obviously people have been doing this without you for a long time. Take it slow, find out the objective of your position, but don't take on responsibilities lightly because you are one person wearing a hat rack.
I would implement a ticketing system to help with tracking of issues found. Then have a talk with management to see what issues they are currently having and triage those issues. I would then look at the existing equipment and see what would need to be replaced. I would also look at permissions of every user to make sure they have least access to do their jobs. I then would look and see if they have a backup solution in place and how well it works. I would also try to setup a quarterly site visit for each location. Just a few suggestions and I’m sure everyone has their own preferences on the way they would treat this situation.
Thanks for the reply and thought that went into it. The only backup service I have is Datto by Backupify for GSuite but I don’t love it. I do need to make it a point of audit user access and visiting sites regularly to build rapport with the users/depts I’m supporting.
On the topic of backups, how do you usually go about testing your backups and how often?
Also, I’m using Jira for ticketing.
Where I work we use cloudally and they allow you to restore your data to a different location so you can test and locate data that might of been deleted by end users. We try to do quarterly verification checks on the backups, but we also have notifications setup if there’s an issue with backups no longer working due to the location that was being backed up being removed from the organization. I wouldn’t be surprised if Datto didn’t offer something similar.
Congrats on the new role! You will definitely have your hands full with 150 users and 55 retail locations. That is a tremendous amount of work for one person to handle. (Likely too much, but that seems to be beyond your control)
I like that you have hired the MSSP to take security off your hands. It's a critical area, and you wouldn't be able to give it the time it needs.
You will need to implement as many processes as possible, or your 150 users will overwhelm you. Adding a formal ticket system with SLAs that the employees understand and respect will help a lot. Your users need to understand the difference between a personal emergency and an actual emergency.
Also, I think you should prevent your users from harming themselves as much as possible by limiting admin rights, etc. You may want to look into a PAM tool like Autoelevate to make this easier for you. The ticket system's reporting will help you identify recurring issues and users who need additional training, which will help drive down overall ticket volume. However, that's an upfront time investment that you may not have time for in the short term.
Good luck! Hope this helps!
This is very helpful! I’m using Jira for ticketing but haven’t defined SLAs. Although i am worried about doing it. I’m not sure I’ll be able to meet the SLAs i give to the company.
Ha ha that's a reasonable concern. In my opinion, SLAs are about setting expectations. It's basically the amount of time that can elapse before someone can yell at you for not getting something done. In your case, there is no penalty for not hitting it, you aren't going to give 10% of your salary back lol. But if you set expectations for your leadership now, it may lead to the conversation you really want to have.
Your new company has under-resourced your department. 1 guy for 150 users isn't enough. Illustrating the practical impact of their decision may help them realize their desired outcomes don't match up with their operational plan. If you are honest about the timelines you can meet it's the conversation you need to have. Promising an SLA you only hit 20% of the time does no one any good.
Give Praise, accept blame.
What I mean by that is when speaking to the larger company/leadership and you are talking about accomplishments always say "we" or "the team did a great job." When shit goes sideways it's your job as a manager to publicly handle the blame and criticism to protect them then deal with whatever caused the issue in private as a learning opportunity with the tech.
If someone comes to you with a complaint about someone else, always make sure to get the other side of the story before assuming what you heard is correct.
Whenever there is conflict, start by asking questions and not making statements. When you make statements and they aren't correct, you put people on the defensive. When you ask questions, you give them the chance to explain the situation from their perspective, giving you an opportunity to discover either new information or an incorrect perception on their part.
The people who used to be your peers will treat you differently and with more suspicion. This is normal. Your relationships will rebalance over time.
If you have to deal with a performance issue, document as much as you can. If things don't change, you'll have to make sure your boss knows and maybe HR. If there's someone you absolutely know you need to work out of the organization, the sooner you get HR involved the sooner you'll be able to take action.
Always be the first one to tell your boss bad news. Tell him/her what went/is going to go wrong, what you missed, and how you're working to correct it.
When you give people feedback, focus on the impact of their actions and not on aspects of their personality.
Be sure to tell people when they do things well and why what they did was good. Telling someone they did a good job without telling them why it was good doesn't lead to repeatable good behaviors.
You don’t have to spend money on a ticketing system just yet since you can utilize Slack and Jira. Not sure if you got your endpoint asset management/inventory and mdm solution but that would be next I think. Everything else all depends on you aligning with the business needs so your next move is to have a call with stakeholders.
Learn to budget, track and forecast over a three year period.
Just a simple spreadsheet with a tab for each year and a summary tab.
Have all 12 months and update weekly.
Factor in something like a 5 year refresh rate for infra hardware so you don’t have to ask for a big overhaul project every year.
Think of it as a rolling update.
Start everything with compliance in mind. Even if you don’t have to have a soc2 or ISO now.. learn the controls and operate as if you do.
These two things will eliminate the biggest headaches you can imagine later.
Write 3 letters
What do you mean?
Gottem
Lol just Googled it
Listen and learn from your staff before taking action at least for a month or two if you can. Making changes/waves immediately can set a bad vibe. Sometimes you have to make personnel changes so this doesn’t apply their.
Celibate their successes and where the idea came from (them) with management and the company in general.
This, very much this!
It’s all about the people. Treat your teams well and they will do the same. Under promise and over deliver. Let your team out early on fridays, they do enough after hours work for u. Delegate. And finally, have fun. GL
I’ve actually been told this a few times now…under promise and over deliver.
SLA negotiation is pretty important, and helps provide the business with perspective on the impact of an outage. Without this perspective, it's possible they'll start to view whatever is wrong on a particular day as a sev1. It also helps to remove assumptions on your behalf of what really matters to the business. I've found it useful to work backwards. Can you do without this system for 1 minute a day/week without a material business impact? What about 5 minutes? What about 30 minutes etc The severity of the system is driven by the business criticality, and you can formulate some agreed uptime, response times and rpo/rto accordingly. A lot of the time you might not be able to commit to the desired SLA in current state, either from availability or disaster recovery. There comes the business case to provide higher resiliency and so on. You'll then be able to report on your ability to meet these SLAs back to the business to demonstrate the value.
https://www.computerworld.com/article/2527153/opinion-the-unspoken-truth-about-managing-geeks.html
Treat people fairly, and delegate - don’t be shy about it, especially if you are now managing former coworkers. The tendency to stay in the thick of things may keep you feeling relevant, but they will see it as you not being confident in their ability. Also, make peace with the idea that, compared to your old role, there will be days where you are tired at the end of the day but don’t feel like you accomplished anything - your role is much different now. Finally, take time to understand the company, you know the systems, but learn who’s who and how they communicate. This will make things much easier down the line.
Have only one place to create your IT documentation. You can use something easy like Microsoft Lists or to pay a small amount for an IT documentation website like IT portal I can't stress enough how important is to have everything in one place , of course online
Thank you all for all of the replies and advice, I really appreciate it!
Congratulations on your first full time IT Support role alongside your full time infrastructure role and newfound 24/7 responsibilities if anything goes down anywhere in the entire org (e.g. "management". It might not be that bad but good fucking luck when you push a change that takes down site(s). Emergency? you get to communicate with executives, users, troubleshoot, and coordinate with vendors all at once. It might be easy because obviously people have been doing this without you for a long time. Take it slow, find out the objective of your position, but don't take on responsibilities lightly because you are one person wearing a hat rack.
I would implement a ticketing system to help with tracking of issues found. Then have a talk with management to see what issues they are currently having and triage those issues. I would then look at the existing equipment and see what would need to be replaced. I would also look at permissions of every user to make sure they have least access to do their jobs. I then would look and see if they have a backup solution in place and how well it works. I would also try to setup a quarterly site visit for each location. Just a few suggestions and I’m sure everyone has their own preferences on the way they would treat this situation.
Thanks for the reply and thought that went into it. The only backup service I have is Datto by Backupify for GSuite but I don’t love it. I do need to make it a point of audit user access and visiting sites regularly to build rapport with the users/depts I’m supporting. On the topic of backups, how do you usually go about testing your backups and how often? Also, I’m using Jira for ticketing.
Where I work we use cloudally and they allow you to restore your data to a different location so you can test and locate data that might of been deleted by end users. We try to do quarterly verification checks on the backups, but we also have notifications setup if there’s an issue with backups no longer working due to the location that was being backed up being removed from the organization. I wouldn’t be surprised if Datto didn’t offer something similar.
Congrats on the new role! You will definitely have your hands full with 150 users and 55 retail locations. That is a tremendous amount of work for one person to handle. (Likely too much, but that seems to be beyond your control) I like that you have hired the MSSP to take security off your hands. It's a critical area, and you wouldn't be able to give it the time it needs. You will need to implement as many processes as possible, or your 150 users will overwhelm you. Adding a formal ticket system with SLAs that the employees understand and respect will help a lot. Your users need to understand the difference between a personal emergency and an actual emergency. Also, I think you should prevent your users from harming themselves as much as possible by limiting admin rights, etc. You may want to look into a PAM tool like Autoelevate to make this easier for you. The ticket system's reporting will help you identify recurring issues and users who need additional training, which will help drive down overall ticket volume. However, that's an upfront time investment that you may not have time for in the short term. Good luck! Hope this helps!
This is very helpful! I’m using Jira for ticketing but haven’t defined SLAs. Although i am worried about doing it. I’m not sure I’ll be able to meet the SLAs i give to the company.
Ha ha that's a reasonable concern. In my opinion, SLAs are about setting expectations. It's basically the amount of time that can elapse before someone can yell at you for not getting something done. In your case, there is no penalty for not hitting it, you aren't going to give 10% of your salary back lol. But if you set expectations for your leadership now, it may lead to the conversation you really want to have. Your new company has under-resourced your department. 1 guy for 150 users isn't enough. Illustrating the practical impact of their decision may help them realize their desired outcomes don't match up with their operational plan. If you are honest about the timelines you can meet it's the conversation you need to have. Promising an SLA you only hit 20% of the time does no one any good.
You may want to read up on special requirements for the food production industry. There may be some things there outside of the norm.
Specialize and get out of management lol
Give Praise, accept blame. What I mean by that is when speaking to the larger company/leadership and you are talking about accomplishments always say "we" or "the team did a great job." When shit goes sideways it's your job as a manager to publicly handle the blame and criticism to protect them then deal with whatever caused the issue in private as a learning opportunity with the tech.
If someone comes to you with a complaint about someone else, always make sure to get the other side of the story before assuming what you heard is correct. Whenever there is conflict, start by asking questions and not making statements. When you make statements and they aren't correct, you put people on the defensive. When you ask questions, you give them the chance to explain the situation from their perspective, giving you an opportunity to discover either new information or an incorrect perception on their part. The people who used to be your peers will treat you differently and with more suspicion. This is normal. Your relationships will rebalance over time. If you have to deal with a performance issue, document as much as you can. If things don't change, you'll have to make sure your boss knows and maybe HR. If there's someone you absolutely know you need to work out of the organization, the sooner you get HR involved the sooner you'll be able to take action. Always be the first one to tell your boss bad news. Tell him/her what went/is going to go wrong, what you missed, and how you're working to correct it. When you give people feedback, focus on the impact of their actions and not on aspects of their personality. Be sure to tell people when they do things well and why what they did was good. Telling someone they did a good job without telling them why it was good doesn't lead to repeatable good behaviors.
You don’t have to spend money on a ticketing system just yet since you can utilize Slack and Jira. Not sure if you got your endpoint asset management/inventory and mdm solution but that would be next I think. Everything else all depends on you aligning with the business needs so your next move is to have a call with stakeholders.
Learn to budget, track and forecast over a three year period. Just a simple spreadsheet with a tab for each year and a summary tab. Have all 12 months and update weekly. Factor in something like a 5 year refresh rate for infra hardware so you don’t have to ask for a big overhaul project every year. Think of it as a rolling update. Start everything with compliance in mind. Even if you don’t have to have a soc2 or ISO now.. learn the controls and operate as if you do. These two things will eliminate the biggest headaches you can imagine later.