Rules for the Single Employee Tech Department (#1)

At the risk of sounding pretentious; I give you Rule Number One of Dave's Rules for the Single Employee Tech Department! (Results may vary.)

Rule Number One: Quantify

The first thing to do when you find yourself as the lone tech in your organization is to find out what you are dealing with. Here now is my pretentious-sounding 4-Step Process to Quantify the Technological Assets of Your Organization.

1. Inventory. You must count all of the PCs, monitors, printers, servers, routers, switches, scanners, etc. More than that, you need to know their serial numbers, asset numbers, model names/numbers, manufacturers, revision numbers (if applicable), location, purchase date, purchase price and replacement cost. Then you need to know what software is running on all that hardware and how many licenses you own for each piece of software. Getting this information: pain in the neck. Having it in an easily accessible location when you need it: priceless.
   
   
2. Benchmark. Take performance measurements of servers and network equipment at regular intervals. It's tough to know how poorly equipment is performing if you don't know how well it should be working.
   
   
3. Log. Keep a pad of paper near your servers (or, if you SSH or RDP into your servers to maintain them, keep the pad near your workstation). Write down the date and time of every patch, installation, uninstallation, shutdown, and maintenance job. Then you will be able to see what you were doing at the time the weird things started appearing in the Event Logs. With everything else you have to keep track of, you need all the help you can get to remember what you've done.
   
   Speaking of keeping track of what you've done...
   
   
4. Report. Start using a help desk application. Spiceworks has a nice help desk. It's free too, so it ought to fit your budget. Keep track of every task you perform in here. Again it is a pain to do, especially when you have so many other things to do but it is important to have a record of what you do all day. Remember, your time is a asset. It needs to be quantified like everything else. Print reports at regular intervals (once a month should work) and turn them in to your boss. Even if he doesn't look at them, you can always use them to your advantage. "As you've no doubt noticed from the monthly reports," you'll say, "I have brought the number of support calls down by 23% in the last three months. Surely that is good for a raise." Or, if the numbers aren't so rosy: "If you would have approved the hiring of a part-time assistant for me, the number of trouble tickets wouldn't be increasing!"

Stay tuned for part two in this special series: Simplify!