1. Purchase a copy of joe's book for self and everyone at work and everyone you know.
To be serious though, in your shoes, my choice would be to work 70-80 hours a week and spend the extra 10-20 hours for a while trying to identify anything that could be automated or handled in some other safe way that requires less of my time and then work to get that done. Try to find some big hitters that if you get cleared out of the way gives you more time to find more things to automate to get out of the way. If you save say 2 minutes on something you do 20 times a day that is still 40 minutes saved. Also consider that when you automate things, they tend to be done in a more consistent manner so you run into less issues due to small mistakes in consistency that cause investigation time. The last ops position that I started back in 2001 when I did this I actually ended up working closer to probably 100 or more hours a week handling manually requests and issues globally as I was the only one on the brand new team that had any understanding on how to really fix things that were broken and things at that point were very broken. That went on for months but slowly adding the appropriate scripts the work load reduced as things took minutes instead of tens of minutes or seconds instead of minutes and the other guys were able to run the scripts to do things and were spinning up on how everything worked. If you do nothing manually that is recurring I would be extremely surprised. I haven't seen an ops job yet that didn't have a lot of time spent doing the same things over and over again. If however, that is the case, then the efficiencies have to be gained in producing tools to help you troubleshoot and make that go quicker. There is always something that can be done to make a group faster, better, and more efficient. The thing is to find it and figure out what it takes to get better and then do it. It might be the solution is buy something, but that usually doesn't go over well so keep in mind anything you can buy you can probably cobble together yourself if you need it bad enough and it will help you. It falls back to something I have said multiple times on list and other places. If you are too busy chopping down the trees to sharpen the axe you will just get further and further behind as your axe dulls. In every IT ops based job I have had, it was always a case of too much work and too few resources. Not once did I get hired into an ops group that had nothing to do or a bunch of free time to sit around. I expect that makes sense because there is no reason to hire someone if there is free time. So the goal is always to try and figure out how to do things in such a way that it can be done better and more efficiently. While you are figuring out how to automate you are learning how things work so you become more deadly with your troubleshooting-fu so when problems crop up outside of the normal requests and daily grind you are quicker (hopefully) at solving them. -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Rocky Habeeb Sent: Monday, January 23, 2006 10:14 AM To: ActiveDir@mail.activedir.org Subject: RE: [ActiveDir] OT: speaking of AD books... Dear people, I would appreciate it it you would prioritize the following for me; [A] [ ] Work 60 hours a week managing (with only one other person) 250 PCs in 4 states and 40 Servers. [B] [ ] Live at the only bookmark in my browser when at home "www.microsoft.com" looking for solutions, etc. [C] [ ] Read joe's (et al) new book. [D] [ ] Studying for my MCSA [E] [ ] Studying for my MCP [F] [ ] Studying for my MCSE [G] [ ] Securing my network [H] [ ] Reading the new book joe is going to write on BP's [Yes, please tell me how to rebuild a DC remotely from bare metal!!] [I] [ ] Reading Robbie's book(s) (note: please sub-prioritize those books) [J] [ ] Balanicing my checkbook ( hey .. I have to do something else at home, right?) [K] [ ] Patching my network [L] [ ] Learn to script [M] [ ] Watch College basketball on TV [N] [ ] Read all of Sakari's books [O] [ ] Read the AD list archives completely "Hey, I'm almost serious here." As Guido would say, "That's enough for today." RH List info : http://www.activedir.org/List.aspx List FAQ : http://www.activedir.org/ListFAQ.aspx List archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/activedir%40mail.activedir.org/ List info : http://www.activedir.org/List.aspx List FAQ : http://www.activedir.org/ListFAQ.aspx List archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/activedir%40mail.activedir.org/
