Transition from Doer to Thinker - Supporting the Boss
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My boss (IT Director) recently met with me to mention that he really needs to make a transition from doer to more of a thinker. He created the company intranet we use that is a read-only view of our Epicor ERP system with many enhancements. This platform has become one of our core business tools for office and shop workers alike for the flow of parts through our shops. He's been the main one doing development with myself and the two technicians who work for me helping troubleshoot here and there. None of us know as much as he does about the code in the intranet site.
I build the ecosystem for our move to Epicor 10 and was heavily involved in application testing, migration, and user training. So I know the ERP system pretty well in terms of administration and some of the core functionality but am certainly no expert in all of it. Our techs know most of the day to day admin stuff and can help here and there.
So the boss asked me to help him choose one of the technicians to be his understudy. This person would help carry the torch of developing new functionality and fixing issues present within existing functionality. Neither tech that works for me is a web developer or really knows SQL. That is going to change for one of them.
My boss chose the candidate with some input from me, and I am truly happy for this guy because he wants to be a programmer. I'm not sure how much time he will end up spending on helping my boss versus doing help desk stuff here pretty soon, but the boss and I will have some sort of discussion about it next week.
Though I am excited for this technician, I am concerned about department workload (in terms of general help desk) when the transition partially happens / fully happens. It will fall primarily on myself and on the other technician. And then someone has to be the true sysadmin (so again, likely me). I want to seem accepting of this change because it needs to happen. But, I also feel like we will need to grow the department because of it.
And additionally, if the other technician feels slighted in some way, that can cause problems for the team as a whole. I'm not sure if the tech who has been chosen will still report to me or may just report to my boss (no idea). I guess we will see how it goes.
I had planned to bring up the need for a dedicated sysadmin who can implement a little cleanup of the server landscape, help get rid of Server 2003, and migrate the last of our physical boxes to VMs. There are many other admin enhancements that, if completed, has potential to reduce some administrative overhead. It's just that the work required to get there will be a hefty load.
I should also mention that my boss and I get along very well, and he really does value my input on things.
Do any of you have some advice for this situation?
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Will there be a clear cut over or will the tech slowly move away?
I would run a report on all this one technician that you are losing does. Actually I would run a report on what each of you does per day/week. How many tickets a day does this person currently work on? Was this person responsible for any work on a project timeline that now will not happen?
Layout your current hours worked for you and the remaining technician and now add add in what this person was working on. This should give you a very clear picture of what you can and cant do.
Also layout that sysadmin project plan and estimate hours for that as well.
This should give you and your boss a clear picture of what your department needs.
You boss seems to be a very anaylatical thinker so analyze everything you can for him and bring it to him to process. You can at least get him thinking about the departments upcoming needs and the best way to start the transition.
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The way it was presented to me is that this will be gradual in nature because my boss has to train this guy to be able to do SQL and web development. But the boss and I will discuss it early this coming week (right before I will be gone for 6 business days).
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I don't think my boss anticipates this becoming a full time thing for this guy, but with the reliance on our intranet platform and its importance to the business, I could see execs becoming extremely excited about more development being done, more enhancements being made, and more value coming to the business through it. We all know there is a cost to do something just like there is a cost to not do something. If this guy can help my boss finish some really important projects, it could help the business make more money. That's how I look at it. In my I head I feel I this guy will have to do it full time in the end.
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Thinker rather than doer? Hmmn. Sounds nice. I tend to do my thinking on my way to and from work; at 3am in the morning when I can't sleep; and during boring management meetings.
I have no advice other than not to sweat it to much at this stage. Why not wait to see how things pan out?
I always try and avoid too much specialisation. In my teams people will always have different strengths and different interests, but I try and keep everyone involved in everything to some degree. In my last job I had two technicians with the same job title and job spec, but one was interested in ERP and one was interested in general IT. So I'd try and arrange it so that they mostly worked on stuff they were interested in. But they were comfortable covering for each other. And I tried to make the work team based as I think people work better in pairs rather than as lone wolves.
Splitting roles is good for maximising productivity through division of labour, but what if people are off sick or on holiday - how do you arrange cover? Or if your ERP projects get really busy, whist your other IT projects slacken off - you could find two of you have two much work, whilst the other two are scratching around looking for something to do.
How many servers and users are you all supporting? Is it just the four of you doing everything at the moment or are the other people reporting to your boss?
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In my experience any time someone says well we will only need this person a little bit that never lasts. I also know for a fact you put in crazy hours does your boss really realize this? Knowing that you have an employee working nights etc. and seeing actual hours laid out are 2 separate things sometimes.
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My boss only has me and the guys who work for me reporting to him. We have about 50 servers (most VMs) and 225ish users spread across 6 physical locations to support as a team. The boss is more ERP and operations centric, in lots of meetings, not involved in our daily IT stuff mostly.
As for the team, each tech is essentially a generalist with one able to cover for the other (mostly), and they can probably cover for me 75% of the time. I can cover for my boss to some extent (maybe 40% of the time when needed).
One tech started in July 2014 knowing only that he was a tech hobbyist (came from being an operator in our shops, actually). He's the one who will be the boss's apprentice. The other tech started in March 2012. Each has an interest in programming.
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I would say the boss may have an idea what hours I keep but also has come to expect that I will keep those kind of hours. He told me once after I e-mailed him at 3 AM about something that he's come to expect me to behave that way. It's not necessarily his expectation but that he expects I will have that way because of who I am (if that makes any sense).
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So there will only be two of you supporting 225 users and 50 servers? That doesn't seem enough. Then again, are you in the US, as I know you Americans seem to like working crazy hours? Also, 50 servers is a lot for 200 odd users! What do they all do?
Is this the same role that you talked about in my SQL Server thread? In which case, most of your users don't use Epicor?
It sounds like you need to demand another person, anyway.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
So there will only be two of you supporting 225 users and 50 servers? That doesn't seem enough. Then again, are you in the US, as I know you Americans seem to like working crazy hours? Also, 50 servers is a lot for 200 odd users! What do they all do?
Is this the same role that you talked about in my SQL Server thread? In which case, most of your users don't use Epicor?
It sounds like you need to demand another person, anyway.
As for the servers, we have 4 just for Epicor (4 VMs that is). We have at least 3 file servers, 3 DCs spread over 3 ESXi hosts, an older SQL server, about 2 or 3 test servers, and 5-10 VMs that run Engineering software or are dedicated to a specific software for better disaster recovery, etc.
You are correct about the roles I discussed in the other thread. We do not have an extremely large Epicor user base (30 office users I believe and about 14 data collection). Most every computer / tablet user in some form or fashion uses our intranet system daily (which is Epicor data even if not using the Epicor GUI). And my boss can't handle all the changes people want.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
So there will only be two of you supporting 225 users and 50 servers? That doesn't seem enough. Then again, are you in the US, as I know you Americans seem to like working crazy hours? Also, 50 servers is a lot for 200 odd users! What do they all do?
Is this the same role that you talked about in my SQL Server thread? In which case, most of your users don't use Epicor?
It sounds like you need to demand another person, anyway.
The density of users isn't so much of a problem, it's the manpower to handle vacations and stuff. One admin per 300 servers isn't a problem as long as you only need support on one shift and don't care about support on holidays and sick days.
http://www.smbitjournal.com/2013/02/the-smallest-it-department/
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Well sure, every environment is different. If you're happy you can run the place with two people @NetworkNerd then that's cool - only you know your environment. I just thought it seemed a little light based on environments I've worked in.
What does your company do, out of interest? I see you have one of those magical green "service provider" tags so does that mean it's an IT company?
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@Carnival-Boy said:
Well sure, every environment is different. If you're happy you can run the place with two people @NetworkNerd then that's cool - only you know your environment. I just thought it seemed a little light based on environments I've worked in.
What does your company do, out of interest? I see you have one of those magical green "service provider" tags so does that mean it's an IT company?
My tag says Service Provider because I do part time work for NTG. The company where I work during the day is a Manufacturing company. We're a job shop and can make just about anything out of metal. The ERP system is our life blood (as well as the intranet site built on top of it) for controlling and seeing the flow of parts through our shops.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
Well sure, every environment is different. If you're happy you can run the place with two people @NetworkNerd then that's cool - only you know your environment. I just thought it seemed a little light based on environments I've worked in.
What does your company do, out of interest? I see you have one of those magical green "service provider" tags so does that mean it's an IT company?
I wish that we had "where I work" and company detail options in our profiles. That would be a very nice feature to have added in here.
