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Right now we’re a 2 person team, with two offices in the same state (2 hours away). I’m the IT Manager, in that I do mostly the server end upgrades, maintenance, etc. I also do help desks.

My coworker does a lot of the help desks but has been doing another specialized job that can eat up 10-30 hours a week depending on the project. He’s also studying and practicing in the dev windows server environment as time permits (never).

We have a 3rd party IT provide for assistance as needed, and they come once a month for 4 hours for some proactive work I assign them. They also provide training classes on request.

So here’s my theory, and would love to hear back on some suggestions from fellow IT people:

I would like to shift my role (Still IT Manager) to remove from help desk tickets (except, of course, server related ones that need my full attention, or when someone has a day off).

I want to spend my days working on the infrastructure and making sure it’s as solid as possible, doing updates and upgrades. I want to do policy updates, documentation, diagramming and future planning along with budgeting.

I also want to start spending a few hours going over technology with any new hire (The new hiring HR person does this currently). I think this will help our department and build us a good reputation.

I would also like to start doing training classes on updated or new software up to twice a month as demanded in a small computer lab setting.

My current partner is new in the industry, and we’ve had him for a year and he’s done a fantastic job learning, but his responsibility has grown in that he’s gotten a part time job inside of the company processing legal documents through software. This can eat up a part of his day/week/month in a hurry.

What I would like to see is a 3rd person brought in that would focus 100% on helpdesk where my other guy helps with the overflow. They would work together on that.

I would work with my current guy with server stuff, training him on my job (cross training everywhere).

What do other users do? Suggestions? We have about 110 users and 2 offices. I want to get to my other office once per week, and this would help.

Thoughts, suggestions, anything would be appreciated. Thanks!

9 Spice ups
2

Sounds like you have more than enough business reason to hire another head.

1 Spice up
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I’m in the market for a new job. What area of the country would you be hiring in?

1 Spice up
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Well, I guess I’m looking for any information on how others did this. I’m newer to the management side, and I have a boss myself (who has a…etc). It would be more of a part time think like 3 days a week for someone in school so they could get a foot in the door is our thinking? Any thoughts or suggestions on how people accomplish this? Or what I should be using that third person for primarily, maybe I’m doing it wrong?

Just want some other thoughts. I don’t like to think I’m right all the time :slight_smile: My wife makes sure I know I’m not.

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Your situation is very similar to mine. My intern was doing so much graphics design and other things outside of my department that we ended up moving him and now it’s just me. So I’m also looking to add a junior sys admin \ help desk intern. The tasks you want to do are very similar to mine. I need another person so I can focus on network \ server upgrades, training etc. So to me it sounds like your headed in the right direction, the same direction as me.

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You probably want a paid intern. The drawback with interns (in my experience) is that it tends to be more beneficial to them than the company. My team supports the data center - systems/networks/storage/etc, so we find it’s hard to get someone with little to know experience that can really help with the work load. More often than not we spend more time training them and it doesn’t free us up to get other things done. They tend to be a better fit for the helpdesk or desktop support. There tends to be high turnover as well - summer for a few months or one semester. If you can get someone in on an internship where they get paid and credit that’s a great opportunity for them and hopefully they’ll stay on for a year or two after as a paid part time employee. They might be able to refer someone else when they leave too.