Welcome to “Do IT Right,” a 9-part series on how to succeed in the most important areas of IT management. In this series we introduce you to Simmons & Hawking, a fictional law firm that is scaling up its outdated IT infrastructure, and the relatable challenges faced by their IT stakeholders. In part 5, we continued our journey with Natalie, an IT Support Engineer at Simmons & Hawking, as she perfected their asset management, but while Natalie is highly skilled and experienced, she is quickly discovering how revitalizing an IT infrastructure has its unexpected issues.
Natalie and her team have quickly figured out just how challenging getting a new IT infrastructure up and running is. It has been a long and stressful process to get to this point—but they’ve been able to navigate the many hurdles thanks to identifying needs and securing expert partners to shepherd them to launch. However, nothing seems to compare in difficulty to maintaining these new systems and keep them running smoothly with a well-oiled service and support workflow.
While creating a solid and well-structured plan has helped tremendously in making their vision come to life, real-world application of new systems and programs is a new challenge altogether. Natalie and her team are running into issues they did not anticipate. Certain technologies aren’t working the way they should, which means crucial information isn’t being shared correctly if at all.
Working with their providers to try and identify the problem areas is tying up Natalie’s team for hours…and sometimes days. They’ve put in dozens of trouble tickets with multiple suppliers and just keeping tabs on those is a challenge. They are falling behind on other work and issues are not getting fixed promptly, which is jeopardizing their ability to keep business flowing as usual. All of those hours of hard work from Ethan and Natalie feel like it was all for nothing.
But getting defeated now does not have to be your reality! There are solutions to every problem you will incur if you know where to look.
With your IT infrastructure being stress-tested in the wild, you need to make sure that a strong service and support system is in place to keep the environment from collapsing in on itself. Strong service and support are the keys to keeping everything running smoothly and efficiently.
Putting together a service and support operation can be as daunting as implementing a new IT infrastructure. So outsourcing to an expert partner ensures that you always have the robust, dynamic support you need. Tickets get rapid response, solutions are quickly implemented, and users can happily do their work without disruption. It will not only help you, but it will keep your employees motivated, confident, and successful.
