Understood. Every job has challenges, they vary, but they all exist. Well at least every job I have had has had challenges. Without them I wonder why I am there and start getting into trouble. ;o)
I don't know everything you are doing. I expect there is nothing you can do that will all of a sudden just free up 3 hours a day for you. But what things are you not looking at because you feel it is quicker just to take care of it manually? Could be nothing but that wouldn't be normal as people tend to do that. The point being I could list things for a long time that couldn't really be scripted either but that does nothing to help you work towards scripting the things that can be. How many issues have you encountered that were due to someone making a mistake that possibly could have been alleviated if a script had done the work instead of someone manually doing it in ADUC? Though from the description you give here, you probably don't touch ADUC but once a quarter. Not to be mean but would be surprised if that were accurate. I certainly don't relate anymore to doing everything from blowing on toner cartidges to looking for mice bites in the network closet on the network cables but at some point I did do it and other things like it and did survive and move on. As someone else indicated, if things are so impossible to complete the management needs to get involved and help needs to be brought in. Interns are a good idea, both folks trying to switch into something new and also go check out the local high school too for some folks in the computer classes. These folks get the low end work (blowing on printer cartridges, carting paper to the printers, etc). The printer stuff I agree with Brian on completely. Most large companies do farm out all support for printers, they aren't worth having local IT people work on them. If your management doesn't buy into that, start tracking your time you spend on them detailing to the minute you spend taking calls and traveling to and from them and working on them and combine in the time that the users can't use the printer (if it prevents them from working) into it. Then at the end of the month you present that to your management and make sure you point out how much you are making hourly. Regardless of what you make, it is very likely an external printer support model which includes leasing newer devices with full support will be cheaper (basically a page print model). If not, the manager has decided that that is your job and there is nothing else to do about it, drop it and move on to something else. Overall that guidance goes for everything you do. Track what you are doing to the minute for a month and then seriously sit down and determine where a majority of the time is being spent. What items cause that time to be spent, can any of it be delegated, removed, or automated by you or ANYONE else. Then work on the next biggest category, etc. Who knows maybe you will find a single HP 8100 that is sucking up 3 hours a week which if you make as little as say $20 an hour which is at the low end $30 an hour for the employer is $90 per week or over $4500 a year... All for one printer. Plus what things aren't being done during those 156 hours that could make a difference in how well the company works? It could be something else, say the time you spend unloading a truck or whatever, survey what is being done, figure out root causes, categorize it all, find out where the waste is that you can attack. Of course, not to be mean though it may sound so, but the alternative is to sit back and decide no one has ever done what you are doing and it is being done the only way it can possibly be done. It may or may not be accurate, I nor anyone else on this list is in any position to judge. Certainly they can be no change unless you instigate it. Without deviation from the norm, there can be no progress. Don't expect a magic bullet, my previous post wasn't even trying to intimate that. You win this game by saving minutes here and there as they add up to hours and days over months. In the meanwhile you use the little bits of gained time to work on being proactive in some other area. If I were buried in a small office environment and I couldn't find a way from doing the surveys of everything to get some sort of handle on it I would document everything and try to sweet talk Susan Bradley into trying to help me out with what I do as I may be missing resources I wasn't aware of. The Small Business World is different from the Big Business World and she is one of the people I know that is very involved in knowing how to best handle it. One item to help get attention is to make #4 wait while working on #1. Then when asked you can say, yeah, not only am I the one who is the "expert" on your machine installation, but I also have to keep our old printers working. VPs don't like to hear that generally because many of them are quite spoiled but it does get their attention. I did something similar once with the head executive of the financial division of a very large company that had HIS name on the side of the buildings. He wanted a one off PC set up for him and supported by me, basically he wanted Win95 instead of Win3.1. I was very clear that the standard was Win3.1. He asked what was stopping him from going down to CompUSA and buying the CD and installing it himself. I said there is absolutely nothing stopping you Ed, your family owns this company. But consider that you will then be in a position where we can't support you very well or possibly at all because you will have a different setup than the other 2000 people in this building. Also think about this, you feel this standard load is unuseable, how well do you think everyone else likes it? How is it impacting their capability? I am not saying it was entirely me, but within a few months, a whole bunch of money was allocated to convert the users in that building to Windows 95 and then the other 8000 or so folks in the rest of the division. The rest of the company was already doing Windows 95 but the Finance folks didn't want to pay for the upgrade so we were stuck with the older stuff. Finance folks never want to spend money on computer equipment it seems. Anyway enough stories of days gone by. Whenever I hear something all of a sudden happened, it generally says something changed. It isn't common for things to just all of a sudden stop working without help. If you have very strict standards documented on how things are configured and then set them up to be built with scripts if possible so you have consistency, you get to look at whatever it is to see if that is still the the configuration. If not, reconfigure back to standard and let the people know you know it got touched. The different OSes. Again document how much extra time it takes to handle all of the different things and point that out to management. If it takes 4 hours per OS to figure it out and a manager takes out his little calculator and realizes he/she is burning 12 hours for probably nothing, they start to think about how to correct and working towards a common platform naturally starts happening. Survey survey survey, track track track track. Telling folks it takes about this much time each time or it takes a lot of time will not get changes into place unless the person you are telling starts tracking it and most likely unless they are a really good manager, they won't. Note this isn't something I was just born knowing. I had a manager back at the company I mentioned above early on do this to me. He tracked the various things I griped about and when he asked me questions about it I thought he was just trying to make me feel better. At the end of a month, he asked me how I had spent my time for the month and which things burned up the most time. I admitted I didn't know but felt it was X. It wasn't X, X wasn't even in the top ten, it was just the last thing I had worked on. In fact he could tell me in terms of time and effort what had burned up my time. We started making plans to knock those down. I felt like a complete tool. After that I was careful to try and understand where my time was spent when I considered myself buried so I could adequately explain where and why I was buried so I could get help with it or figure out myself a way to reduce it. I am glad he made me feel like a complete tool because it really shaped how I worked from then on and made me more efficient. Not sure what you consider file maintanence but I did indeed automate what we called file maintenance at the same company mentioned above. When we switched from about 100 OS/2 Servers to 4 NT4 servers we went from using about 150MB of disk space to using multiple GBs of space in the course of maybe 6 months. I mentioned this previously that I wrote a perl script that scanned the file shares and created a nice big report of all of the files. The tool got better and better as it tried to work out which files were the same (such as the latest joke EXE running around or latest picture jokes, etc) and would flag them for me to look at them manually so in the end, I didn't have to look at everything, I looked at few things and deleted them as necessary and contacted the users and the managers to let them know what I did and why. Problems like that slowly start to correct themselves and if they don't, you buy some good quota software and slap it into place and tell the folks to have at it. If they want a quota increase, then you walk through every file they have in their folders with them. If it is lejit, give them the space. If it isn't, they probably won't be bothering you again. After a while, you start to get a feel for what you should see in the file listing and set up the scripts to filter it more and more something that may take hours a week drops to maybe an hour or less. If you have good backups, heck just set up the process to start cleaning up after the backups and just delete things. If it is MP3's, MPGs, and various images depending on what your company does, you could see a surprising gain in disk space and the folks will be scared to ask you to restore their files anyway and consider themselves lucky for not being hauled in front of a manager. To wrap this overly long note up. Nothing anyone on this list says will apply 100% to anyone else. The environments vary greatly and what I think is a great idea in one place I will think is a horrible idea somewhere else let alone what others may think. Basically it is up to Rocky, if you say it isn't possible to make what you do more efficient, I can't argue the point, I have no ground to stand on. -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Rocky Habeeb Sent: Tuesday, January 24, 2006 9:56 AM To: ActiveDir@mail.activedir.org Subject: RE: [ActiveDir] OT: speaking of AD books... As always, thanks joe for responding to my query which was only half heartededly posed. The other half was deadly serious. To be honest, I think that many of the experts who post on this group have lost site of what it's like to work in a small shop. WE DO EVERYTHING THAT NEEDS TO BE DONE FROM SOUP TO NUTS. We unload FedEx trucks and then go install Oracle 9i. We build PCs from scratch and then go backup servers over a VPN using DAT drives (because we cannot get an integrated solution to do it). How do you automate things like the following: [1] Spending 30 minutes cleaning with alcohol and swabs the fuser roll of an HP 8100 printer so it prints without streaks? [2] Troubleshoot an HP Kayak XU800 that for months worked fine and now reboots at will? [3] Perform file maintenance on 8 major servers comprising 1 TB because Users will not clean off data and drives are maxxed? [4] Figure out why an Executive VP's Eudora email is consistently crashing? [5] Install and configure client supplied custom software on 10 new PCs for work with a high profile client? (Did I mention that some PCs are NT, some W2K and some XP and the software will only work on ... well ... guess which ones? We have to figure it out) [1] [6] Download patches for surveying program software that has to be installed on laptops that are in the field (ie: unaccessible) and waiting updates because TOPCON GPS Surveying instruments will not work until they see the patch? [7] Determine why a quarter million dollar Citrix farm routinely crashes ESRI arcGIS 9.0 taking with it the entire production of 20 Users and corrupting an Oracle database as a bonus? [8] Remotely trying to troubleshoot why a color printer in a remote site all of a sudden won't print? [9] Trying to figure out why, all of a sudden, an Adaptec snap server (running Linux under windows) now decides no one has permission to read it? [10] Oh! The custom Timesheet application that Accounting put in place now, all of a sudden, has lost all of the timesheets for this week. Where did they go? Fact is, I could go on like this for 10 more pages and not repeat a single item above, I swear that is not an exaggeration. Fact is, in the past 6 years, I have not come to work one single day and not faced a brand new problem that no one has ever seen before. No lie! You can't automate my life. You can't build scripts to do virtually any of this. Yes you could build scripts to do some, but it would not make a difference in the number of hours per week I work. Yes I could choose to work 40 hours per week and no one tells me to work 50, 60 or 70. But the work I don't get done today will be here tomorrow. I should be fixing problems right now, but I watch this list like a hawk because I know, something I read from one of the masters is going to save my life (read a__) some day and if I fail to see it then, shame on me. Well, your next question is going to be "How do you have time to write all this if you're so busy?" I take the time, just like you do. You can't tell me that you are less busy than me. I'm pretty sure you're not, but just answer me this. When you were in ops, did you have the breadth of problems that I describe above? If so, then sign me: YMYMYM because you "ARE" the master. If so, really help me out. Tell me how to automate the above ten items. Everything you and the others say is true, but unless you're living in my world, these solutions don't help me. But I still love you, ;-) [1] "YES, I know standardize." I would if I had the money, but 50% of the capital spending budget is going to buy a new airplane this year. Sorry, I can't "show you the money." RH ___________________________________________ -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of joe Sent: Monday, January 23, 2006 9:03 PM To: ActiveDir@mail.activedir.org Subject: RE: [ActiveDir] OT: speaking of AD books... 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." 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