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Hi there,

45M, working as an “IT guy” since about 7 years now at the same company (in Europe) and made the cross entry from Account Management / Sales in various industries. Bachelor business level education.

I am basically an allround Admin - as many in smaller orgs, I get to wear a plethora of hats: MS365, Entra, Intune, SAP B1, Docebo LMS, Zoom, Azure AI advice etc. and a focus on Security / NIS2. Telcom and A/V support for the business. Networking too - but don’t do that alone. Much of my tasks are related to 1st/2nd level support, but I also do projects, like introduction of new software, trying to get ITIL into our processes, training people to work more securely etc. Evaluating en purchasing Hard- and software.

Company has about 100 FTEs, ca. 150-180 devices to manage. IT team consists of 4 people: Manager, WebDeveloper / 2nd Level, C# Developer and dear old me who gets to do a bit of it all.

The thing is: I find myself often in situations where coworkers EXPECT something to be handled by IT. They imply it is, but we never heard of Software Package “x” they are referring to. Not been discussed with us, not cleared with us, often nobody even bothered to do an GDPR check for the software but they still purchased it and using it.

We have high personnel turnover so often someone new would come in, demand we purchase software “x” as it is the solution to all our problems (and everything we already have is declared “sh*t”) then they use it, then they leave. The handover to their successors is never properly done who then complain that “x” is a mess and we should purchase “Y” to solve the problem.

And that has been grinding my gears for a while now. Instead of making work what we have, we have strings of people coming in, declaring “I have the solution” (and being lauded for it) and we at IT get to clean up the debris and get to explain why “Y” simply cannot work with some of the things we already have in place or it would take a disparagingly big effort to make it work.

In my view, this boils down to the fact that there is no pressure from top management to “make work what you have”. I don’t mind replacing stuff that really blatantly does not work, but to throw away one good solution after another and wasting everybody’s time and money (while I can’t even get the budget for a good RMM tool) gets me frustrated and depressed. One example: In the nine years I have worked at the place we had 6 CRM systems coming through amongst others:

Salesforce → “Not sufficient for our needs” (Are you bloody kidding me?!?)
SAP Cloud for Customer → “Doesn’t work” and people just stopped using it (no good data in, no good data out)
Zendesk Sell → One department flat out refuses to use it because “we don’t like it” which is why

Talks are beginning to go searching for CRM #7…

Or we replaced the backend of our webshop three times now and each time it is “Yeah but it can’t sh*t rainbow coloured eggs” (sorry, yes I am really frustrated) so let’s look for another new one. Proposals from the business contain gold nuggets like “Let’s just use WordPress.”

People who have NO idea how software works get to decide what is purchased, while IT is sometimes not even included in the discussion.

And meanwhile I loose a little bit of my sanity every day in an organisation where everything is expected from IT (because we apparently also fix doorbells and toilet doors) but nobody bothers to actually listen to what we have to say.

I am probably not alone in this, but I am curious as to just how wide spread / how bad this is nowadays or if there are still organisations out there that actually have SANE approaches to that kind of thing?

26 Spice ups
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a) as you do ITIL, insist on establishing OLAs (OperationLevelAgreements) that define what you can deliver in what time etc.
b) enforce change-management for any new software
b2) enforce requirements engineering to get to know, what your stakeholders really need and if it fits into your general setup

yes, all of that is a time sink when starting it, but it will provide structures that will address your actual pains

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I feel your pain, and the dynamics you describe are far more widespread than you might think. It’s incredibly easy and cheap for someone to say ‘why don’t we start using “X”?’. It’s very much more complicated to find out why that shouldn’t be done, and put it forward in a cogent and understandable fashion. You can’t do that on the spot of course, and so Mr/Ms ‘Why don’t we use X?’ looks more intelligent, more informed and more capable than the IT staff, who really don’t have the spare time to deal with this nonsense every time it rears its head.

It’s all a ‘look at me’ power game. Institute a structured change management system that just dispenses with unresearched, untested dross

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Sounds like a fundamental process problem. Refuse to implement any new solutions until existing ones have been thoroughly tested, every avenue explored. If they complain, explain to the CEO’s why this is costing them more money, wasted staff time and needless pain.
If they don’t listen to that, I’d say it’s time to move on.

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New people will always try to bring the solutions they are familiar with into a new environment. They want to create a “comfort zone” where they don’t feel unknowledgeable.

IT people do exactly the same thing every time. “Why don’t you use Intune? How come you’re not using GPO activation instead of WSUS? How come I have to use HTML instead of markup? In my previous job, we…”

Based on your description, the direction from the top is “anything goes.” If that’s the case, you have either get on board with it or get gone. You don’t run the show - you’re an operator. You don’t make decisions - you implement policy.

You say no one listens to what you have to say. It appears that you don’t listen to them, either. They neither want nor need your advice. It’s naive to believe that you’re in a position to tell the other employees what’s best for them. CEO is a nice job, but it’s not yours.

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Mine used to be like that. We’re a Housing Association about twice your size.
We had people declaring that the existing software was not fit for purpose - it was, just not configured the way they needed it. Of course the moment you asked them to work with you to configure it, they either said they were too busy, or that it was an IT problem and they shouldn’t be involved, or that paying out £2k for a couple of days consultancy to get it sorted was too expensive, and that they wanted this £20k system instead.

That sounds very familiar. Up to and including not being involved until the Friday night when ‘we’ were allegedly going live on Monday with their latest white elephant.

Eventually, when management realised this was a ridiculously expensive way of doing things, we started getting backup from them to push back against the people who didn’t want to use what we had. That’s not to say that we don’t get new software now, but at least IT are involved from the inception point, and can often point people at existing software we have that will do what they want and will be a damned sight cheaper and easier to connect to our other systems, and generally, they are happy to use that.

We also have been spending the past ten or fifteen years ‘helping the users to help themselves’. Things that don’t need to be admin tasks are done by a trusted user or manager in the teams that require them. Adding properties to our Housing Management system, changing rents, adding new charges etc. all used to be handled centrally, but now most of it is in the hands of the teams themselves and they actually feel empowered to do things and sort things out for themselves that makes their lives easier.

But we still get some pushback.
Getting in our previous repairs system, the Asset Management team managers would not do any of the things that were required to set it up correctly, or, when we were made to do it for them, wouldn’t provide even the data to make it work. So we made educated guesses, talking to the rest of the team. But of course, this did not fit the way the team manager thought in his head it would work, so having paid £120k for this software, he declared that it was useless, and that it was IT’s fault. But this is also the same guy who wouldn’t have his team doing data entry, because it was an IT issue.

He’s gone now. His team were doing the data entry behind his back anyway because it was easier and quicker for them to process the data straight into the system than into a spreadsheet to send to us to load. We’ve also just replaced the repairs system with one that works because the new manager understood that this is their software. Everyone managed to pull their weight, and while it took longer to get in than planned, it was because they were working on it together and improving the way it would work for them before it got released.

For that it tended to be management wanting a solution and instead talking to us, or if they did, taking our suggestions seriously, going out and getting a consultant in. We did manage to get this to stop after we managed to shoot down their findings a number of times. We might get asked “How do we make X happen?” by management, and would come back with a way we could do it, often that didn’t cost anything or had a relatively small pricetag. They would tell us no, and would then pay a consultant £60k to come in, ask us the same question, write it up in a PowerPoint presentation and show it to the board. Following this we would get the board coming to us saying “Why hadn’t you done this already? The consultant says it wouldn’t cost anything!” and we just started responding with copies of the E-mails where we had already advised this and been told no by them.

The final straw came when we got a consultant in to sort out the acquisition of the aforementioned repairs system. They came in, talked to management, bypassed IT, spoke to other, similarly sized organisations, and came back with an all-singing, all-dancing presentation for the board, who duly signed off on the promised pricetag from the consultant.
It was then presented to us as a fait accompli, and we were told “You’ve got £50k upfront and £10K a year for five years to get this in.”

Reader, the license costs alone upfront were £120k.

I put together an actual cost sheet over five years, and it was somewhere around £500k, and sent it back to management. They read it, and told me I was wrong, because the consultant had said it would only cost £100k over five years, and they had paid him a lot of money, so he must be right, pretty much in those words.
I spent what amounted to three whole days being grilled by our directors as to why I thought it would cost so much. So I broke it down for them, with all the consultant’s misconceptions, fallacies, and just downright untruths. I tore apart his presentation, and backed up my data with facts.†
The directors were incredulous. It kept coming back to “We paid him because he’s supposed to know about these things and you just work here”, and eventually they realised that I and my colleagues actually knew our systems better than some consultant does.

Thankfully, now we are mostly kept in the loop, and do get have our ideas and concerns taken seriously. I don’t think we’ve had an IT consultant come near the organisation since then.

It can get better, but it can be quite painful getting that to happen.

Again, we’ve mostly got people out of that mindset. It took a while, but we eventually convinced them that for it to be IT-related it at least needed to have a plug. I don’t mind fixing the laminator, for example.

† Yes, I realise that sounds like one of those “And then everyone applauded!” moments. But no, I really did spend three days stuck in a room with our directors basically explaining how maths works.

9 Spice ups
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Bit of a nuance here: I WANT to implement ITIL (and work according to it to my best ability and understanding), the rest of the org does not see ANY value in that, including my boss. It’s seen as “bureaucratic” “not facilitating” and “too complicated”.

Also, I am an executing employee, not a manager, so I cannot enforce anything. I can only make suggestions. Which are often ignored.

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Hmm… maybe I am not listening because they aren’t? Chicken and the egg story?

And I wish… I WISH… there would be a policy. But like you said, it’s a free-for-all and everybody can shout anything without having to substantiate their claims and it’s being taken seriously.

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Ours were concerned about that for a while, but pointing out to them that a) it’s a framework, and you can pick and choose what you actually want to run with from it and b) it’s basically codified common sense (which I realise is not that common), they started to see it as something that just allowed us to sing from the same hymnsheet.

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Sounds like you managed to turn it around. Much of your story sounds familiar. By now I need both hands to count the times expensive consultants were brought in just to explain in nicer Powerpoint’s than ours what we have already been saying for years.

The problem is: due to the high personnel turnover, the organization is very “forgetful” and bases it’s info on half-truths, guesses, hearsay (and varying interpretations of that) and outright assumptions. We only have ONE department head who has been with us for more than 2-3 years.

So there is also a lot of flip-flopping on decisions which also costs a load of money.

Also: for shiny tools from the latest edition of “Marketing daily” there seems to be a bottomless pit in budget. If I ask for an RMM that would cost about 3.500 / year that would finally allow me to reliably automate application update and patch management? Too expensive. Yet I am somehow expected to achieve NIS2 compliance by the end of the year.

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ITIL and the others are basically tools to bring structure into your company environment.
a good management hook can be that this is a key to get any certification like ISO 27001 or such.

but we also had a lot of customers who appreciated us achieving these standards, and for some procurement contracts it was indeed necessary to be certified.
this might open their minds for new business opportunities, because they may enter markets which ask for those standards.

but I know the general problem also, we have what is called “flat hierarchies” and means “no one is willing to be reliable for decisions” :slight_smile:

7 Spice ups
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I was going to say something similar. If you can’t get buy-in from the execs, then you are just spinning your wheels for nothing.
EDIT: If you ever get hit with malware or ransomware, I but the tune changes.

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TBH, I also don’t see many other ways to deal with this:

  • Go nuts over the daily idiocracy, keep fighting the good fight (trying to get their buy-in) and eventually burn out
  • Mentally check out and just mindlessly do whatever is asked of you
  • Leave
6 Spice ups
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Robert has a point about just rolling with it if that is what the upper level management wants. You can’t always fight that. However, you don’t have to give up if you feel you have a better plan. You could submit a proposal to them, which they might listen to if you write it in a respectful way and show them how the current practices are costing the company money, sort of like Uselessinfomine described after the consultant came in, and then show them how your plan will save the company money.

If they don’t go for it, then worst case you are back where you are now, but if they like it, you might have a chance to help make a change for the better.

7 Spice ups
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Addressing Sanity. You rolled a double ought for your SAN check. Welcome to the club.

I agree with @Robert5205 and @HulkSmash. If management does not care, go with it or leave. If the company gets hit with ransomware, be sure you have a good alibi or you will probably be gone.

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There is honor in staying employed to support yourself, and others that depend upon you.
Keep a written record of the situation(s) and how you would solve them for yourself! This is important, so you can reference it after you have left, and if you come across situations like them again. the point to that is it will keep you 1) sane, and 2) employed and 3) not mindless: your not mindless, your posting here proves that, at least to me. You can also reference the notes to update your resume.CV.

ITiL is a good framework, study the material, even if you don’t test it, take the good and leave the rest.

for what it is worth, I see the value in wanting to do the right thing, even if it is not your decision to do so.

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So, your setup has a lot of good/bad going for YOU specifically…Good in that you’re getting hands-on experience with a lot of big-name software. You can pick any single one of those and go somewhere else, strictly manage ONLY that app and make a good living…as long as the company is willing to keep paying for these migrations, keep learning from them!

Bad, however, is eventually these turnovers (both people and packages) will run the company dry…have your resume up to date and ready to go at a moments’ notice, because that’s about how long you’ll have before you’re “in between opportunities.”

Yes, it’s frustrating fighting shadow-IT, always out of the loop as the next thing comes along, gets put in place, and you’re forced to support it…that’s a top-down culture shift where hands are slapped for doing this, not a bottom-up approach. You won’t ever get this to change if the top-levels aren’t willing to change it.

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Sounds like you need to jump ship. High turnover and management not supporting IT, doesn’t sound like a good environment to work in, and judging by your level of frustration it doesn’t sound like a good place.

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I’m also going to echo a bit of what Robert and Z have said. Going with it is fine, but I’m personally not one to keep my opinion to myself. Get something respectfully in writing so if/when everything crumbles you’ve got something that says, ‘I tried’.

Too often we’re forced to use a solution we know isn’t conducive to efficiency. I learned quickly if I just let it ride without saying anything then I’m just as accountable as the person that actually suggested it. If I put my concerns in writing I’ve at least got an argument for why I’m not accountable.

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This sounds like most of the last 30+ years of my career. :rofl:

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