Well I am not exactly posting these every week but I am slowly improving, who knows maybe one day I will hit my goal of writing a weekly review every week! In my defence, there was very little of interest that happened during the previous week. I spent most of the week showing cablers around the site or attending BETT. Although it was interesting to see professionals at work designing the physical layout of a network. BETT was fine, lots of sales type stuff and loads of cool hardware that I knew I would never get the authorisation to buy.
This week I have learned a valuable lesson. Well perhaps to valuable lessons. The first is that no one really understands what my jobs actually is and what I do on a day to day basis. Sure they know that I am there to fix things when they have gone wrong but aside from that, they have no idea. The second is that people are way more impressed with spreadsheet that they are with servers. The joys of being the only tech on site I guess. Let me explain.
Every week, I have a catchup with my line manager, we go through a run down of what has happened during the week and discuss plans moving forward. It is pretty informal but does work very well to keep senior management in the loop. It also acts as a nice way for me to review the week and what progress (is any) we have made on the IT side of things. Now when I started in the role, one of the largest hurdles to overcome (aside from the fact that I hadn’t got a clue what I was supposed to be doing) was the complete lack of documentation for anything. Literally nothing was documented so everything had to be discovered first hand. As I have been stating in previous blogs, the first few months went by in a blur of outages and upgrades. We essentially fell from one crisis to the next and slowly clawed away and improving stability. As I have gotten to a point where I am not spending every available minute firefighting. I have begun to start to consider my wider role. So one of the projects I have undertakes is documenting everything.
The first hurdle I had to deal with, was not really knowing how to do this. So I spent a fair amount of time reading around on the subject and playing with different systems to see what fit both my and the business needs. I eventually settled on using One Note and playing with overall structure to maintain some semblance of organisation as more and more documents are added. I have also begun creating a knowledge base, consisting of guides and checklists for some of the recurring tasks that need to be completed.
This week, I decided to sit down and think about the routine maintenance that needs to be carried out on the various hardware and systems that we have. With my new found love of documenting everything I do, I decided to go all in an create a spreadsheet which could be used for tracking all of the routine maintenance tasks, grouped roughly by frequency (daily, weekly, termly and yearly). I also was fairly brain dead after a particularly hectic Tuesday so had dedicated significantly more time to formatting than was strictly necessary.
So Friday rolls around and I am sat with my line manager giving him a run down of all the tasks that have been completed. Things like patching security updates so we aren’t exposed to vulnerabilities, updating and maintaining the servers so that everything keeps ticking along smoothly, so nothing super important or anything and then we get to the agenda point for me to show the spreadsheet. Suddenly, he sits up and takes notice. “This is excellent.” he declares “I am going to show the rest of SLT this afternoon in our meeting.” He exclaims, with the enthusiasm of a primary school child who has been allowed to bring his new puppy in for show and tell.
So there we have it, documenting everything is important. Not only for future you and the people who come after, but also because nicely formatted spreadsheets help non technical staff discuss what you do during meetings. In some ways I would like to be a fly on the wall at one of these meetings. In others, I am concerned I would end up chewing my own leg off our of boredom, particularly if a spreadsheet that dull can elicit that much interest.
