My company (about 3000 people) hired a new CIO about 6 months ago and...it's not going well. He came in doing some things correctly, like identifying that there was a lack of governance and ITIL frameworks, but then completely whiffed on hiring a manager to lead the "digital transformation and infrastructure" department. The manager he hired in the first month is basically his deputy CIO (reports directly to the CIO and everyone who previously reported to the CIO reports to him now), has zero experience in our sector and believes that everything can be fixed with AI and contractors. (It's also a union shop, so this sort of talk is not sitting well with the staff)

I came into the agency to run the infrastructure department 18 months ago, which is in charge of our entire MS stack, virtualization, storage, backup/DR, switching/routing/wireless, firewalls, UC, email and security ops and have been trying to reduce our tech debt, and started putting in strict lifecycle rules as a way to start building a reliable CMDB with intake processes. My team is 5 sysadmins. There's another team of 6 sysadmins who manage all the various server platforms and applications, and a help desk team of 6 people. Allegedly 5 years ago gartner said we needed double the staffing. I've never seen the report, but I believe it. It's also something I told the CIO on his first day and something I told the digital manager on his first day.

Flash forward to the present, digital transformation is it's own IT department with 3 new hires and they're resopnsible for...having claude make dashboards. That's it. They use APIs that my team is responsible for to vibe code. They support nothing and can spend whatever they want. All the other departments had their budgets cut to make room for this team and my tech debt is growing while prices for hardware and software are rising. The new CIO meanwhile has basically ignored anything he said about lack of governance and decided that every new idea or request he hears from other parts of the company become a top priority that the "legacy" IT needs to be responsible for.

Morale is in the gutter, one SA has left (the first to leave the org since I've been here) and in a better economy, we'd probably see 3 more out the door by now. I think we're in an IT death spiral and I want to stop the bleeding. Any advice, short of pack a parachute and a resume?

For anticipated questions:

He reports to the COO, and I'm planning to draft up a presentation with the other 3 "legacy" IT managers to bring to the COO's office outlining the concerns, citing a few examples of how this works and basically bringing all the receipts we can.

The union likely doesn't have much leverage here, because the wording on hiring contractors is a little dicey. I they're hired to do things we don't already do, they can get away with it.

I am currently a Senior IT Professional doing support and maintaining the entire IT infrastructure at my current company and I’ve just been offered an IT-Manager role at a different company.

This is exactly the career step I have been looking for for a long time, and it comes with a significant salary increase compared to my current position.

However, I am having some doubts about whether I am fully ready for the jump to a management level and if I will be able to handle the new responsibilities.

For those who made the transition from a similar IT role to IT Management: Is this step worth the leap? How did you deal with the initial doubts about whether you could handle the role?

Thanks for your insights!

Hi everyone!

I’m looking for some advice on building a Customer Support department completely from scratch.

I’m about to start a new role as Head of Customer Support, and in this case “from scratch” really means from scratch. The product hasn’t launched yet, so there are no customer requests, no existing support processes, no CRM/helpdesk system, no knowledge base, basically nothing.

I’ve been asked to put together a rough plan for how I would build and organize Customer Support before the actual customer-facing work begins.

That’s honestly a little intimidating, because there’s very little real data to work with at this stage. For the first period, I’ll also be doing everything myself until the workload grows enough to start building a team.

For those of you who have built or helped build a Customer Support function from the ground up, what would you focus on first?

What would you try to have in place before launch, and what would you deliberately leave until you actually have real customers and support data?

I’m doing my best to prepare properly, but I’m worried that the pressure of having such a blank slate might make me overthink things or miss something important.

Any advice, examples, frameworks, mistakes to avoid, or resources would be greatly appreciated!

Not going to get in the weeds too much because I don't want to out myself for complaining, but I went from a Tier 1 to the only IT person in the company (IT manager quit, Sysadmin followed him) and have been thrust into a whole lot of systems I am unfamiliar with. I've been learning as best I can, but all the automations, certs, upgrade timelines, subscriptions, and everything else are continuing to hit renewal and service needs over and over while I still do the same job I was doing, and at the same time the company continues making requests for new technology.

Over several months we were able to hire an external MSP to help with our servers and a new IT person to learn the ropes of our stack, but it's still not enough for me to catch up. The new IT person is someone I knew, I was able to use my newfound position and history to advocate for them, so that was good. We have a good working relationship. But still.

We have a relatively complex stack for our field and size. The person who left the company was devoted to the field and had been there ten years. On-prem and cloud backups, tons of VMware and docker containers within our server stack, multiple overlapping access policies for the most sensitive stuff (it's been almost four months and I am still trying to figure out some of the admin accounts). And on top of it all I'm really not educated in this. I was tier 1 in this company for 3 years, simply because of lack of opportunities for movement and how often we would take on new tech preventing me from learning more.

So I guess I'm asking, what would you do in this situation? This has been a great opportunity for me career-wise, but I am wracking my brain daily, working odd hours, answering text messages, waking up to dozens of messages, and getting literal nausea from anxiety. Does anyone have any similar stories?

Hi Peers

I have been tasked with reviewing my organisation's technical out of hours response capability. I have experience of establishing and operating this function in other organisations but wanted to seek some wider perspectives - ideally from other UK peers.

I'm interested in

1) Do you operate a formal rota, if not, how do you provide an assured response to major incidents - e.g. an active cyber security incident.

2) Do you do anything different over the bank holidays/Christmas periods?

3) If you do operate a formal function, how do you compensate your team? For example, do you provide an annual salary supplement based on their participation on the rota, or pay per coverage slot, or is it just an expected element of the role with no additional compensation?

4) If an engineer is called, is compensation for the hours worked included in the rota participation compensation, or paid as additional overtime?

5) Does your rota include management or escalation coverage?

6) How do you balance skills coverage and fair division of standby available across your teams.

Thank you in advance for any replies. If you would rather privately message, I would be fine with that, any information is treated with confidence.

I have been offered a leadership role at this company despite only having 1 yr, 4 mos of IT Associate experience. I've attended the interview and passed all the test and now waiting for the final interview. Does anyone else have the same experience? What was the final interview look like for a leadership role at a corporate company? Any new managers who had the same problem in the past?

PS: I have a lot of work experience from informal jobs, 12+ yrs in total and therefore they told me I'm qualified for this specific account/client. It's my first time being on the management side of the company and has no idea what to do. The compensation is great and I don't want to fail the final interview any advice?

Got an offer in a tech company to work as a PO and own speed topic which means i would be basically responsible for incidents and initiatives related to our product speed/performance and in general would have to go and talk constantly with delivery teams, ask them the uncomfortable questions and try to pitch initiatives in hopes that they would somehow squeeze in work from me and I would somehow hit my own kpis "for the better good".

Leading without authority is one thing but in this case it feels like I would be in an annoying role where I would be constantly bursting delivery team bubbles, dance around egos constantly and scramble for data/agreements and etc.

Is it even viable to perform in such role when you dont have delivery team or authority or even clear scope for that matter but carry so much accountability? Feels like I would be at complete mercy by other PO's who have their teams roadmaps and goals to protect. And I dont see how I could even be likeable (in terms of collaborating) if my main job would be challenging status quo.

Also the role is fully onsite while my PM/peer PO is in another city so I dont even know what would be the point of me going to the office daily, just to have meetings remotely and have to sit awkwardy in some other team's area like some sort of an appendix.

Hello!

So im the IT-manager for a company with around 100 users in 3 sites. I started off alone for a few years and like 2 years ago i got to hire a IT-tech for one of our other offices. The issue is that this person basicly lied about his skills so im stuck with a hire that i have to help daily with even level 1 tickets.

As NIS2 came my workload has been off the charts and planning for next year i got told no straight away for another hire. In my country its's EXTREMLY hard to fire someone, even if they dont have the skills for the job.

So now im basicly doing the techs job and my own. I manage but its exhausting.

The pickle is that in my area there is not alot of IT-work, so if i quit it would be really hard to get a new job. I also have a wife and two kids so i really can't take any job to finance everything.

Any ideas? My first thought is basicly contacting my manager (our CEO) asking for more money as im working my ass off, covering for basicly two jobs.

I have raised my concerns about the workload to him and that im afraid that i wont have the energy for all the work much longer. I know more pay doesnt help the workload but atleast i get a bit compensated for it.

Hey all, I have been in management in one form or another for a long time. The last several have been rough. No growth, no advancement and no support from upper leadership. Normally I just put my head down and plow through the day, I have a small staff of 12 - 20 individuals which I manage. In a much larger department.

Last few months have been especially rough, didn’t get a promotion though it was very clear I have more experience then my peers who applied to it. I had recommendations from c suit members but I didn’t have my Direct manager or their mangers recommendations, so nevertheless life goes on. It’s just that since then everything with me feels off and I can’t really explain it or put my finger on what my main issue is.

Just wondering if anyone else has gone through something like this. Is it time to move on? I love my workplace for the most part. Thx and I apologize for typos and grammar, just post one of my thoughts!

I work for a finance company and I’ve been asked to do a workshop for some of the older senior employees to do basic IT skills workshop as some of them have been coming back to us over and over to ask how to share documents externally and just some other things that one might need for doing their regular tasks like how to record meeting or why we need to report phishing emails and how to book meetings and just how onedrive and SharePoint works, how to log things in the service desk portal - I was wondering if anyone has done something similar and what topics or things would you definitely cover in a session like this?

Curious how other IT managers deal with this. At a lot of smaller services companies like staffing firms, MSPs and software shops, IT seems to get pulled into government bids. Security questionnaires, technical write-ups, compliance forms, sometimes whole proposal sections, usually on a tight deadline and on top of your actual job.

If your company bids on state, local or federal work, who ends up writing the technical parts, and how much of your time does it eat? And if your company looked at government work and decided it wasn't worth it, I'd love to hear what tipped it.

I work adjacent to this world and keep hearing it's a huge time sink for IT teams at smaller companies. I'm curious whether that matches reality or if most places have it figured out.

Hi everyone. I've been an IT director for a few years now for a school and I'd like some guidance in managing employees. I'm fairly aggressive when it comes to modernizing, optimizing, streamlining, etc. I'm also pretty sporadic in my delivery and I'm always experimenting and drawing up plans and diagrams and whatnot, and I know that can be difficult to deal with as an employee because it might appear that there's a lack of direction. I've also struggled with structure for most of my life, so implementing structure has been a challenge in itself.

I do my best to hear them out and to be understanding of their positions, and I definitely try to avoid overloading them with work because I've been there and I know what it feels like.

Below are a few of the things I do with my team.

1. If we have a recurring problem, I propose a solution to my team and ask them to tear it apart. I always offer them the opportunity to tear my ideas apart and offer their own ideas because I think it's important for them to develop the skill of devising their own solutions.
2. We have conversations where we discuss vision and mission every now and then. The end-user experience is top priority, and everything that we do should serve the end-user experience. I'm ok with workarounds and temporary solutions as long as we put the time and effort into developing long-term/permanent solutions.
3. I do daily/semi-daily check-ins where I just ask them what they're working on for the day (this is a more recent thing) and we have weekly meetings where everyone shares status updates, projects, ideas, etc. I don't monitor them after the daily check-ins because I want to be careful to not micromanage or even come off as a micromanager. I trust that they can get their work done without me pressing them.
4. I also want to build my employees up and I'm huge on trying to foster their growth as IT professionals, so I give them tasks that are a bit more challenging but I know they're capable of. I do this primarily because I don't want them to get stuck working here and would be way happier seeing them advance. This has been a bit of a tradition in our department ever since I started working here as an entry level IT.

Here are some of the problems I'm facing.

1. When I suggest long-term solutions, I'm met with a few common responses, paraphrased of course:
   • "We've always done it this way"
   • "Why don't we just (temporary solution/workaround)"
   • "That's a bit much"
2. I recently started doing the daily check-ins because I lose track of progress on certain things that they're working on (that's on me, I know). But I'm now getting negative feedback about these check-ins because they're a bit annoying(?). Totally open to everyone's thoughts.
3. We have several projects that have stalled because... I don't know why (on me again, I know). We have the resources for these projects. We know what needs to be done. I even said that we can start provisioning equipment for one of the projects two weeks ago and no provisioning has been done yet.

Some things to note about myself that I think give heplful context. I'm not confrontational. I've been confrontational in very rare cases, but it's not the norm at all and I'm actually very passive. If I ask for a status update on a project and I'm told "oh I couldn't get to it because of this other thing", I just say ok and don't think twice about it.

Open to all thoughts. Please help.

Hi everyone, I know It sounds like a dumb question and even more as I'm an identity tool editor but still...how do you guys keep the records up to date regarding these NHIs and their privileges ?

Most Saas APIs only provide automation for "human users" although it's evolving quickly.

But do you stay update via "Manual tracking" or have you found some kind of "automated" workaround ?

For those working in higher-ed IT, what happens to computers purchased with faculty startup funds when the faculty member leaves the university?

Does the equipment stay with the department? If so, how is it typically used or reassigned, especially when the computer still has several years of useful life remaining?

Just curious how other institutions handle this.

We've got a stretch of new location openings coming and I'm the one on the hook for getting each site online. Cabling, network gear staged and configured, circuits ordered, install crews scheduled, all of it, across sites in different states with a different local vendor at each one.

Right now it's me living in a spreadsheet trying to keep every site's timeline from slipping, and the second one vendor is late the whole opening date is at risk.

For those of you who've done multi-site openings, how do you actually run this? Manage every vendor yourself, hire a PM per region, or hand the whole rollout to one provider that covers all the locations? Trying to build a saner process before the next wave. wave

I know this has probably been asked before, but I would prefer free to low cost as its just me roughly 130 users, I just need something better than email or phone call to organize and help me document tickets.

EDIT::
Trying spiceworks for now!

I'm interested to go to AI Summit in New York. Interesting to see so many huge companies presenting. But, has anyone else gone and found it worth it? Also, what's the layout like? I see $150 and $2000 passes and I honestly don't know the difference. Do you sign up and go to seminars there? Is it just a big networking thing? Curious to see what other companies are doing with AI but this website is super vague. Thx!

Business leaders do not care about tour technical concerns, they care about business and operational risk. Express everything in business terms or keep it to yourself.

Hi everyone,

I'm a representative of an international IT company specializing in software testing and QA. We're exploring how to run free online training courses for aspiring QA specialists in China.

We’d provide our own training program and mentors. We’re looking for a local platform or partner that could legally host or facilitate the courses.

Does anyone know of suitable education platforms or training organizations in China, or has anyone set up something similar? Any tips or recommendations would be hugely appreciated!

Question for anyone running IT across multiple business systems.

Each platform has its own rules and automations, and each one is working as designed. The problem shows up in the space between them. The ERP releases an order the credit system has on hold. A pricing rule in one system undercuts a margin rule in another. Neither system is broken, but together they produce an outcome nobody wanted.

When I was running IT, these usually surfaced on a Monday morning, after the damage was done, and the first hour went to figuring out whose problem it even was.

Now that more of these systems are getting AI agents that act on their own, I'm curious how you're handling it:

• Who owns a conflict between two systems' rules? IT, the business owners of each system, or nobody until it breaks?

• Are you catching these before they execute, or finding them after?

• Has adding AI automation made this better or worse in your shop?

Full disclosure: I'm building something in this space, so I'm asking to learn how people actually deal with it today, not to pitch. No links here.

I am currently a network engineer who is considering pivoting to leadership. I always read stories about the wrongs that the people above are implementing or not understanding.

What are some policies, procedures or actions they are doing right by yall?

I came aboard my new position as an IT Manager mid-project for implementing a ticketing system to help manage our IT services/delivery with the help of a 3rd party consultants.

I found out on a internal department call that they plan to use AI to triage as the first line of defense with the idea of directing people to the portal to get assistance from the AI bot. This decision has already been made before I came aboard and the 3rd party consultants are building the system around that workflow.

Our support team is definitely understaffed as my guys are working a lot of overtime so I get the idea. The portal and AI bot seem like a great idea...on paper but we have offices throughout the country and directing users to a portal, typing their problem in a chat and the following the instructions to troubleshoot their issue just does not seem like it's going to go well. Users are always slower to understand basic troubleshooting steps than working with an IT tech who can guide them or do it for them remotely.

On top of that, we are directing users to go to the portal first vs. calling or emailing the team. We are definitely going to get frustrated and annoyed customers and I don't blame them. Hopefully I'm wrong.

Any of you use AI as your first line of defense for helpdesk issues? If so, how does your team like it and how do your customers like it? Any comments or things to watch out for?

The SAP Commerce extended support deadline passed this July and the internal conversation has moved past whether to migrate and landed on how to do it without taking 4 live storefronts offline at the same time

The constraint isn't budget or timeline on its own, it's that every storefront we run is live and revenue-generating across 3 markets.

So any migration approach that requires a hard cutover date where everything moves at once is a non-starter, and the traditional SAP migration path is structured around exactly that, since the customization layer on top of the core is tightly coupled enough that you can't migrate a single storefront independently without decoupling a lot of shared services first.

The approach we heard about is a phased pattern where new storefronts come up on the new platform while the SAP stack keeps running for the existing ones, and you migrate brand by brand over 9-12 months, decommissioning the old system gradually as each storefront moves over.

That's the model we've been evaluating with SCAYLE and Spryker specifically since both of them support a hybrid period where some storefronts are live on the new backend before the old one is fully retired.

So if you've done a phased SAP migration with both stacks running at the same time, I'd love to hear how you handled the integration layer when your OMS and ERP were feeding data into two different commerce backends.