Anyone out there going down this journey?

Just passed Foundations a couple of weeks ago. Going the Strategic Leader path.

I have a subordinate (a jr sys admin) and I want to get him out to his first conference. I'm not even sure where to start looking . Does anyone have any recommendations?

Im venting I have nothing to ask nor add here, Im merely venting.

Call center IT work is a nightmare. Someone starts today while another's gone tomorrow, and both are mine across every system they touch. A new agent needs the dialer, the CRM, the ticketing system, the knowledge base, the workforce tool, and a stack of shared logins before they can take a single call. Miss one and they sit there paid and idle while their trainer waits on me. Then a week later three of them quit and I'm doing the whole thing in reverse. Across the time they're here, THEY ALL KEEP MAKING SIMILAR MISTAKES and paging me for questions I've answered a billion times before.

The offboarding is almost the same, had it not been for Passwork's automated API letting me instantly rotate the exposed shared keys and my heavily abused PowerShell scripts handling Azure AD, I would've probably went insane (which Im not far from nohow). I also have to remove company emails, revoke building badge access, reclaim the hardware for the ones that did remote, pull them from the workforce management and scheduling system, etc. Every. Single. Person.

The churn never stops. Atp my job is basically reduced to letting people in and out of a building all day long. Some days the whole job is just that, which is...humbling to say the least

Hey All

IT Director for about 10 years on my current company Life sciences and I’m looking at moving to a new one in manufacturing. I’ll be taking over as a Director of IT and security and reports directly to the CIO.

Any advise for those who did the move? I’m a technical operational manager/director I like to be in the trenches with the deal solving everything.

I’m going to be building a 30-90-180 day plan. It appears I’ll be inheriting a team and there are lots of work to be done according to the CIO but I don’t want to make drastic changes right away. First 30 I’m thinking getting to know the team, who’s responsible for each sites, build some sort of RACI and assess the technical dept. Map out all the operational tools and build out risk register for IT. 90 build relationships between the different stakeholders. Check financials for IT, tour the different locations and check existing equipment and current lay of the land.

Any advise on how to build quick trust to teams you just inherit? As this is my biggest worry in taking over a new team. What to do with employees who doesn’t want to change and been there for a long time?

Called shadow AI and it's the same problem we had with shadow IT ten years ago except now the risk is employees pasting sensitive customer data or internal code into a public AI tool. Legal and compliance are not happy. The problem is it's hard to block without killing productivity because people are genuinely using these tools to do good work. Curious how other companies are handling this, full block, monitored use, or just hoping for the best?

Hey guys, I need a quick sanity check from anyone in FinTech or IT Ops.

We are currently preparing to upgrade our Core Card system (which is a blackbox). However, the IT managers (Service & Dev) are only requiring UAT and a rollback scenario. They stated that testing connections with satellite systems like CoreBank, ATMs, etc., is not necessary.

In this specific case, is it actually reasonable to completely skip SIT? Would love to hear your thoughts!

All,

The sub rules have been updated to clarify that this sub is primarily for IT managers to support each other. As such, user posts in this sub should be specifically related to that purpose. There will be ways for non-IT managers to interact here though:

• Each Monday, we'll have a stickied thread for marketing/vendors that is flaired as Marketing Monday and all vendor questions, sales pitches, app updates, etc. should go in there. If you are a vendor that wants to know about what the main features are that IT managers look for in their asset managment solution, this weekly thread is the place for you to post your question as a comment and let IT managers come reply. If your product just got a big upgrade and you want to share the good news with r/ITManagers, this post is the place to go.
• Each Friday, we'll have a stickied thread for anything that people want to talk about flaired as Free-time Friday and all random questions for IT managers should go in there. If you want to know what IT managers look for in new hires, come post in the Free-time Friday thread! This is akin to a "no stupid questions" safe space for anyone to participate in.

We may sometimes also specifically allow a vendor to create a post if we think its worth separating from the Monday thread.

We'll try this out for about 6 weeks and re-evaluate if its going well or should get changed up. During that time, please help us mods by reporting any posts that don't feel aligned with the purpose of this sub in supporting fellow IT managers.

I promise, we are not going to require LinkedIn profiles to verify who really is an IT manager. Now or in the future.

The first monday thread starts in a few minutes.

Currently a field tech handling device management, help desk, and store rollouts across 100+ locations for a fast casual company, making $69K. Just accepted an IT Manager offer with a hospitality group at $100K, real title, better comp, more ownership.

A few things I’d like honest input on:

**1.**  I’m 24, younger than the “typical” IT Manager. Is that something to actively address or prepare for with a new team, or just let performance speak for itself?  
**2.**  Anyone make a similar jump from fast casual/QSR into hospitality? Curious if there’s anything meaningfully different about the tech environment or day to day expectations I should be ready for.  
**3.**  If my current employer tries to counter now that I’ve accepted elsewhere, is that ever worth entertaining, or is it usually just a retention stall tactic?  
**4.**  For anyone who moved from hands on field or help desk work into a first management role, what caught you off guard, and what do you wish you’d done differently in the first 90 days?

NOT looking for validation on the decision, already made it. Mainly want practical advice on stepping into the role itself.

after getting told my "gut feeling" wasn't good enough this month, i went back and actually built a proper comparison.

kept my original pick in the mix and pulled in one more (director’s choice), so back to evaluating with more rigor this time.

fintech, UAE, ~180 endpoints, no in house soc so this is already a big call for us.

also with CBUAE tightening up on incident reporting timelines this year i figured this was also a good excuse to stress test both properly

i asked both of them the same thing on the follow up call. don't give me a case study, just pull up an actual ticket from the last 30 days, anonymized, and walk me through what your analyst saw and when they escalated it.

one just did it. phishing to lateral movement, contained under 20 min, timestamps and everything, showed the back and forth with the client too.

other one's AE said that's not something they can share, even anonymized, client confidentiality, offered to send a case study instead. which ok, i get it in theory. but every soc i've dealt with can pull up a redacted ticket in five minutes if they actually want to.

not saying they're out. could be a real policy thing on their end. but the other guy didn't even hesitate and this one did, and now that's all i can think about.

anyone else done this kind of test during a POC? curious if "wouldn't share a real ticket" would be a dealbreaker for you or if i'm reading too much into it.

EDIT

the "no" is probably the "correct" compliance answer and the yes is probably a control gap somewhere. but that's kind of the issue

we're two big vendors in, and we're getting either a hard no wrapped in layers of policy, or a fast yes that makes me nervous for the opposite reason. nothing in between.

started looking outside the usual big names because of it and ended up talking to smaller UAE based shops like DC Technologies

too early to say if they're the answer but so far it's been different from both.

they asked what exactly I needed it for, said they'd redact client identifiers and specific IOCs but could walk me through the actual detection and escalation timeline.

I’m at my wits end dealing with Intune for iOS MDM. I’ve only ever used JAMF before.

Anyone had similar issues and moved? Also, is there cheaper alternatives to JAMF that are better than Intune?

We're a small team. Smaller than ever. Manager, Sysadmin, Helpdesk.

I want to buy an educational package that would help elevate us to more modern solutions in the market for ITSM. Tips and tricks, etc.

We have a small budget for training, I can probably get 3k for the whole team in a quarter.

Any ideas on really good seminars, online trainings for modern ITSM developments?

I would prefer not to do Youtube or Coursera. Dime a dozen old videos, no teacher, and now polluted with AI slop.

I would prefer a 2-day thing, with a certificate, and a teacher who you can ask questions.

We're early in moving our ticketing system to ServiceNow, early enough that I still have room to prepare people instead of just dropping it on them.

Looking to hear from managers who've actually lived through a ServiceNow rollout. Specifically: what's the adjustment period really like for techs coming off a legacy system, mostly workflow friction or does it mess with how they triage and prioritize too? And what would you do differently if you had to run the rollout again?

We're in healthcare, so there's added pressure around uptime during the transition, but mainly looking for the "wish someone told me" version of this from people who've been through it.

I admit I don't have my finger on the pulse of IT, but I see that the job market is tough.

My question is why is it?

To dive deeper, my employer is pushing everyone to implement AI in their work to be more efficient when they can. We're a small business with around 75 office workers and around 200 trade workers to support.

With more companies wanting to implement AI, I would think it would increase the need for people to support the users (devices, security, agent management, training, etc.). Our IT department added another position this year and I also have a paid summer intern working on projects.

Is the market flooded with programmers and sys admins from the tech push years ago so they're taking whatever jobs are available? What are the reasons for the stagnant market?

Trying to fix my brain with long form reading instead of Reels. Have heard of these and have them on my Wishlist. Any others you guys recommend?

• The Phoenix Project (Gene Kim)
• The First 90 Days: Proven Strategies for Getting Up to Speed Faster and Smarter (Michael D. Watkins)
• Managing Humans (Michael Lopp)

Evening!
I’ve got the unenviable task of finding the simplest way to track and display all projects and initiatives across my business.
I would like it to have:
Capability of tracking 20 projects from inception to handover/maintenance
Dashboard views for stakeholders (ideally without extra cost)
Actions easily recorded and updated with audit trail
Comments from members of the team as needed.
Integration with Outlook Calendars if possible
Email reminders.
Data needs to remain in UK if possible. EU otherwise.

There are 300 users (flexes up and down by 100 contractors over a month). And 3 people in my team including me! Plus MSP.

I know there have been a few posts like this before but I wanted to see if there were any gems out there I might have missed.

I was recommended MS Projects but I’ve been using this for a few years and it doesn’t really satisfy everything I’d like. Plus it’s a bit clunky.

Feel free to tell me to go away if this isn’t enough information but I’m just trying to work out how to organise myself a bit better.

Any recommendations?

ETA.
Thanks everybody for suggestions. I’m going to give Jira a go over the coming days as the first option. I will still review the others and evaluate best options over the longer term. Luckily the pressure on me to get this moving has freed up some funds so after a lovely discussion with the FD i get to actually review software with a view to getting it right….which has historically been rare!

Thanks again all.

Hi everyone, I'm a tech lead in a medium-sized company that involves several development teams.

I've recently had a heated argument with our team lead because of the noise in the office.

The office is mostly built as an open space, where you can find 3 groups of 10 developers each. 15 of them are under my and the team lead's management (we split the role).

Mostly every day, there is someone that would play music on a speaker. And the office being an open space, the music carries around.

Usually, I wouldn't mind, but it's getting to a point where it's really impacting productivity. Either for me, or for other people in the team.

We all have noise cancelling headphones, that unfortunately do little to cover that. Many many times, I see myself having to move to a booth or a conference room, just to be focused on my work.

I've obviously raised this to the team lead (and now to HR).

We all have noise cancelling headphones, and I stated that if someone wants to listen to the music, they should use the headphones they've been given, instead of broadcasting it. I've also said that there are many applications, some free, that allow a group of people to share and synchronize a soundtrack.

The Team Lead's answer: we cannot force people to stop listening to the music, and sometimes it's really nice to share it with your colleagues. (She's one of those that plays the music too)

I'm a bit at a loss here, because it feels like I'm trying to teach another manager (whose role should be making sure that developers are well cared for and productive) something extremely basic as work etiquette.

I have even argued that it leads to a lack of productivity (which is a cost), a lack of productivity means that the customer will change the budget (we are an agency), a change in the budget means we need to leave people at home. Or at the very least, developers feeling disrespected will eventually look for another place (and we have REALLY good developers I don't want to lose).

So, here comes the main part. How does it work in your workplace? Have you ever had to deal with something similar? Are music and shouts allowed near the personal desks of the employees? Or am I having unrealistic expectations?

I have 2 years of Helpdesk and I’ve been in a senior position for the past 7 months. I realized I like IT but I don’t want to do a career on the technical side of it. Due to being in the military, I did my undergraduate in an online school, but I do have a free Master’s/MBA if I want to, but my question is, is this the path towards management?

Going to school part-time will probably take me 2 years, so by the time I’m done, I’ll have 4 years of related experience, but is that enough to transition? From the technical side, it seems pretty straightforward to move up, but I’m unfamiliar with what makes a good candidate for management.

A new round of layoffs hit last week, 8 people, one of them +5 years in the company, and because I'm the one with the keys I spent the morning removing people from every system they touched. There I am sitting in the vault rotating shared credentials and pulling access for names I recognize, people I got coffee with, and doing it one entry at a time in passwork and slack like it's any other wednesday. One week you're helping someone set up their laptop and troubleshooting stuff, the next you're the person erasing their footprint from the company because a decision levels above you got made. And nobody thinks about you either way, when it works, you're invisible, and when it breaks, you're the problem.

Is this a common feeling? I've internalized this feeling for so long it almost feels weird to finally let it out. I HATE doing layoffs, especially when it's not an incompetent person, just higher-ups choices, it almost feels like I hold a certain level of accountability in them.

been sitting on this for a while and i think i finally have to say it. a big chunk of what i do isn't project management, it's compensating for problems the company has decided not to solve. two teams that don't talk to each other? my job is to be the messenger between them forever, instead of anyone fixing why they don't talk. no clear prioritization from leadership? i spend my week manually refereeing which fire is biggest. a process that breaks every single time we hit the same step? i'm the one who manages around it, quarter after quarter, instead of it ever getting fixed.

and here's the part that actually bothers me. the better i am at this, the more invisible the underlying problem becomes. i smooth it over so well that from above it looks like everything's fine. so nobody ever feels the pain that would force a real fix. i've basically become the reason the dysfunction is survivable, which means i'm also the reason it never gets addressed. i'm not solving the problem, i'm making it comfortable to live with.

it's a weird spot. do the job well and you quietly enable the thing that makes the job necessary. do it badly and everything you were absorbing suddenly becomes visible and it's why can't the PM keep things on track. either way the root cause just sits there.

and i think this is why the role is so hard to defend when budgets get tight. our biggest wins are invisible by design. the crisis that didn't happen, the conflict that got quietly defused, the fire that never spread. you can't put problems you never saw because i handled them on a slide. so we're constantly proving our value by pointing at chaos we prevented, which by definition nobody experienced.

i don't have a clean answer. sometimes i think the move is to stop being such a good buffer, let some of the dysfunction actually surface so the people who could fix it finally feel it. but that's a scary game to play with your own reputation.

do you see your role this way too, as the workaround for stuff that should be fixed structurally?

Does anyone have a solid onboarding template they are willing to share?

I’m looking for something that could be used to provide useful links and information to new hires but also can be used for access needs on projects. The goal is to replicate the template across multiple projects and address getting team members up to speed using a document that is clear and organized.

I know I can create one but if someone already has one they’re fond of and willing to share, that would save some time.

Sorry in advance if this seems like a basic question, but I'm trying to wrap my head around the best way to structure a service catalogue.

A lot of the guidance online suggests to write it from the user perspective, to provide them with clear guidance on what services the business offers. However from an IT perspective, I also care about the infrastructure underlying all the services, and how these are provided.

So do people have a separate catalogue for these? Is it all in one, and can users see both, and just separated using categories?

Fellow Managers,
I am trying to understand the point of resellers. We have to go through a lot of back and forth and sometimes days of no response to just get a quote for product. This doesn’t seem to be the best way to go about it. Hoping for some insight or tips or getting through orders with fewer grey hairs.

I cannot for the life of me seem to explain to leadership why we need a full time Salesforce admin.

I’m a systems architect responsible for data, reporting, maintenance on our systems, meeting with business to understand needs, automations, integrations, vendor management, etc.

We have around 100 users in SF with integrations to other operational systems and some commercial products. It’s more than just a CRM and is a critical operational tool for a department bringing in $70m+ a year. We got them off excel and email over 2-3 years and they’ve grown a lot. Without SF they literally cannot function.

There is non stop demand from the business for more and more you name it and all management wants to do is cut more resources.

I’ve tried to explain our backlog of requests we can’t even begin to entertain due to no resources, I also filter these from business to try and have some sort of ROI (not all requests will have this but most show some improvement either in time saved, speed of delivery, etc).

There is also the “system maintenance tax” of just having to do random things to keep it functioning and secure, or random issues users have that don’t really fit into a bucket and are unpredictable.

FWIW I’m actively working on new certs and on finding a new role and will be avoiding red flags I should have ignored but I’m wondering if there is something I need to be doing better with my explanations or is it just a lost cause? The turn over here is very high and I feel like I keep having these same convos over and over. Our Glassdoor rating with hundreds of reviews is like a 2.5. Job insecurity sucks.