1

Hi all,

I have a massive increase in responsibility coming very soon and am a little bit nervous about it! Let me paint the picture. I was brought in as IT support 3 or 4 years ago to help my boss as he was a one man band for IT support, System Admin and Network Admin as well as being a software developer. The idea was that I work my way to take off as much of these roles off him as possible to enable him to spend most of his time writing software. Now it’s got to the point where my skill set is somewhere between System Admin and Network Admin (although probably more System Admin if I’m being honest with myself) so the company have decided to employ a Junior IT Support Assistant to try and take some of the easier tasks off me. Now this all sounds well and good but I know for a fact the board members will be keeping an eye on me with this as they are fully expecting me to make the leap from helping my manager to basically taking on all of the System Admin and Network Admin roles leaving the IT support to the Junior and the Software Development to my manager.

Now this is exactly what I want, but I can’t help but be a little worried about this new responsibility. For example yesterday we had quite a lot of down time on our Exchange Server (about 6 hours) which was caused due to a Microsoft Security update that was pushed out to our server and then pulled by Microsoft as they realised there was something wrong with it. I didn’t fix the issue myself but made a point to sit and try help my manager as much as possible to try and understand his troubleshooting process and the inner workings of our Exchange Server. My point being that I couldn’t imagine resolving this issue by my self. I think a lot of the problem is that since I have been here I have always had my manager available to assist with any issues I struggle with. To have this tie cut off seems a bit daunting.

Does anyone have any advice on how I can make this leap?

Thanks

18 Spice ups
2

Things like Exchange (beyond basic day to day tasks and basic monitoring) probably require proper training, they can’t expect you to suddenly pick up advanced exchange knowledge without any kind of proper training.

1 Spice up
3

Hi Daniel. Yeah I agree but I think the problem I have is that my manager has never had any training he has just picked it all up. So their argument would be if he can do it why cant you. Which I can kind of understand but they don’t realise my manager is some kind of genius!

4

You can pick up some stuff using web resources and books - I have - I only have a base level knowledge in the sense I can spot issues but not necessarily diagnose them (in my current role Exchange is a managed service so its not relevant to me here) if there was a fundamental problem with exchange I couldn’t fix it without external help - I’ve never had the training and don’t have the experience. First thing I’d be asking for if expected to manage an exchange server especially if its a critical system is the training to be able to support it.

1 Spice up
5

Most things you can pick up with enough experience… I’m guessing he has had a lot more exposure to Exchange in his career than you have. So naturally, troubleshooting issues regarding it come intuitively to him. Remember that he didn’t always have this level of expertise.

I think you should express your concern with your manager about this. Likely he will still be involved if there is a problem that you can’t solve and it’s always good to have others to bounce ideas off of when needed. Tell him that you need to know if he is able to offer support to you in the future. Otherwise, I imagine you could ask for a budget to do some online training somewhere like Lynda.com (I believe others here have mentioned that site - I don’t have any first-hand experience with it though.) I know there are a lot of other online resources as well that may help you so it is worth a try.

6

It’s not a question of, “That guy did it, why can’t you?” (which is a horrible way of justifying lack of training funds). It’s a question of, “Are you OK with me ignoring this other stuff and possibly suffering a major outage while I self-train Exchange?”

Honestly, the reason they haven’t thought about a budget for staff training is because they never had to. However, they’re going from ONE guy to THREE very soon. That’s a 300% increase in staff, and staff - and IT staff in particular - want regular training. It’s one of the ways you retain talent. For $deity’s sake, would a manufacturing shop even think of dropping a new hire onto the floor with just a copy of the assembly manual and saying, “There ya go - have at it. You need to have 300 built by lunch.” Of course not, yet it’s actually astonishingly common for businesses to do exactly this with the staff responsible for maintaining their critical infrastructure.

Look at it this way: learning yourself on the fly doesn’t cost much, but it could cost a LOT. What happens if you make a mistake with the Exchange database - a mistake that’s fairly common that an instructor would tell classrooms full of students, “If you’re doing X to your database, watch out for this!” Only you stumbled into it because the official documentation on TechNet doesn’t specifically mention that little caveat. Sure, it’s in the comments … but who reads those past the first page?!

2 Spice ups
7

Also, in-house Exchange? Really?

One of my first crusades in your shoes would be to GET IT GONE and hosted. How many mailboxes are you talking?

2 Spice ups
8

I should clear something up :confused: - I do get a fair bit of training, specifically Cisco courses. Yes I probably could ask for Exchange courses as well but I have the feeling it wont be met too well. I know my manager will always be there to help me if needed. The push for him to focus solely on software development and not Sys / Network admin is more of a company need than a decision he made himself. I get the feeling he still wants to be involved in that side of the work, in fact he enjoys it. It’s the directors who would like to see the separation between the two roles. I suppose what I need to do is to always try and fix something myself first and then only go to him if needed but when its something like Exchange goes down and no one has access to emails I see that as business critical and it needs to be back up asap. If I see my manager as having a better chance of getting this working quicker than I can I will go to him for help.

9

about 120 mailboxes. myself and my manager have always preferred the idea of hosting everything ourselves and dealing with everything ourselves.

10

Both of these statements are true. So are the two best things I ever learned in Wayne State University’s undergraduate theatre program:

Good, fast, cheap - pick two.

And, everything costs something. The most expensive things don’t cost any money at all, but cost time. (Trust me, there’s not a person working in live theatre that doesn’t have an acute understanding of time.)

Classroom training vs self-training isn’t so much a matter of money (though money is always a consideration), but a matter of opportunity cost. What aren’t you doing while you’re doing something else? Side note: This is why Taurus was brought on, and why he’s about to be promoted and given a minion. Because the opportunity cost for NOT offloading these responsibilities to another person is higher than the salary of the new person.

11

First off - change your Windows Updates so they don’t catch you out like this. Set everything to manual download and schedule regular checks into your diary rather than rolling the dice letting them download and install automatically hoping they all work out ok. This is just one example of being burnt because of that - too often it happens for my liking. Not sure why Microsoft don’t do more testing TBH but who am I to question the almighty MS!

5 Spice ups
12

If things are slow and reasonably stable, sure, go for the self-training. Your employer will - one hopes - appreciate your motivation and willingness to not spend money.

If, however, like most IT at growing companies, you barely have time to turn around in a day, expecting that you’ll have time to properly carve out of your day to self-train is flatly unrealistic. So, by the way, is the expectation that you’ll “do it at home”. Sorry, kids, but I’m a firm believer in Out At Five. Go to work, work hard, get shit done, GO HOME and completely ignore as much of the world that’s not your wife, kids, house, etc as you possibly can.

Granted, there will be exceptions. But when it’s happening all the time, it’s not an exception. You’re effectively working for free at that point, and that’s never OK.

2 Spice ups
13

I agree Robin, and it is something I’ve thought about. However this is the first time something like this has ever happened to us in the five years I’ve been here so its hard to make a call…

14

Also, since you’re moving into a leadership role, I strongly encourage you to pick up a copy of Humanergy’s 50 Dos for Everyday Leadership . (Amazon link here .)

Their office is in the house across the parking lot from my office, and they are - to be blunt - effing amazing.

15

thanks Bryce I will look in to that.

16

What about hosting internal vs external makes you prefer the former? It may be that in time gone by, hosting externally didn’t tick enough boxes for you and your organisation and therefore rightly so stuck to internal, but these days there are so many benefits to external it’s probably worth revaluating the benefits of each, especially given the scenario this topic is about with role shifts and support changes.

1 Spice up
17

Now is the time to get your training, whilst you still have your boss and minion to cover for you.

18

Your never be on your own because you are a member of Spiceworks, thats what we are all here for. Advice, help, ideas or just a shoulder to rant on.

And to be honest you will find that your role name might change but what you do wont because your doing most of it already but you will just be in charge.

19

While there’s nothing specifically wrong with this, that mode of thinking is rather quickly becoming outdated. Since you already have the infrastructure in place, simply ripping it out probably doesn’t make sense … at least not immediately.

As you move into your new role as system admin, keep an eye on how to both save money AND increase efficiency. See above re: Opportunity cost. Sometimes spending a little now is the best way to save a lot later. Try to rid yourself of the “I’ve always done it this way” mentality - that way lies stagnation. The simple reality is you can’t do everything yourself, and you’re foolish to try. We’ll use your Exchange infrastructure as an example here - but the underlying concepts in the analysis can be extrapolated and applied to pretty much every aspect of your infrastructure.

Exchange is a beast that requires special skills to properly maintain. I’m not talking about simply adding and removing mailboxes. We’re talking infrastructure design and care & feeding of that infrastructure. The industry consensus (search the community; there’s LOTS of threads on this) is that in-house Exchange is increasingly inefficient from a cost perspective. Whether it will be in your specific case is unknown until you run the numbers. Remember that you need to look at the total cost of having this in-house, including: hardware, licensing, email antivirus, spam filtering, storage, backups, staff training, electricity used by the server(s), cooling, rack space, UPS capacity, generator capacity (if applicable), and time to plan and maintain (that is, opportunity cost). You may find that, all things considered, it’s cheaper to host. You may find that the cost is higher, but that moving the expense to from capital expenditures an ongoing operational cost has more benefit to the organization. (Talk to your accountant/CFO on that point.) You may find there’s no benefit to changing things. The point is, of course, that you simply won’t know until you conduct the analysis.

20

I often see employees at various companies stuck in their job. One of the things that hold them back is their own lack of intitative. When it’s 4:59pm, they are shutting down the computer and out the door at 5. If IT people, in general, had the intitiative of the average employee many companies would still be running on DOS. At 122 mailboxes, the average Exchange class will probably be a waste of time. Seems like so many of these training classes take a week and cover a lot of large enterprise topics. I’ve never had a week to spare for a class. If there is something I need to get up to speed on I buy a book and I read it. I just plow through the whole thing as fast as I can. I can go back and re-read the sections that pertain more to my situation later. It’s just a part of being successful in this field. Like stables2511 said, you always have Spiceworks (and Google).

1 Spice up