Slashdot Mirror
First Thing IT Managers Do In the Morning?
An anonymous reader writes "When I was a wee-little IT Manager, I interviewed for a position at an online CRM provider in San Francisco, a job I certainly was qualified for, at least on paper. One of the interviewer's questions was 'What is the first thing you do when you get to work in the morning?' I thought saying 'Read Slashdot' wouldn't be what he was looking for — so I made up something, I'm sure, equally lame. I didn't get the job. But the question has stuck with me over the years. What do real IT and MIS managers do when they walk in to the office in the morning? What Web sites or tools do they look at or use the first thing? Remember, this is for posterity, so please be honest."
The first thing you do every morning is check the sev 1 problems that have occurred when you are out. Next off you look at the 24 hour report to see what is out of whack. Anything odd you follow up on. If everything is fine then you have a cup of strong coffee and wait for the first dumb question of the day.
Deal with the disasters first, after that everything in the day is a lightweight bonus.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
I'm a programmer, not an IT person. But the very first thing I do in the mornings is check my email. I need to know if anyone had any problems while I was gone, or if there's something urgent that needs taking care of. Basically, I check for emergencies first thing. After that, I read Slashdot, and start planning out my day. (Generally, I'm fairly useless until my brain wakes up. Which happens around noon. But my company insists I work 10-6 anyway, rather than 12-8)
The first thing I do in the morning is boot up my computer. Then I grab a cup of coffee while it is booting up. If it's still booting, I check in with my coworkers to see what's in store for the day - I try to keep the conversations short. Once the bootup is complete I start up email and work on timesheet/paperwork while my brain is warming up for the day. In short, I first thing in the morning, I multitask and prepare for the day ahead.
I'm not a personnel manager, but a technical lead, and as such do have a bunch of technical types that I manage. So if you want to include me...
Seriously, bring up a browser, start the usual stuff loading (/., Ars, CNN, etc.) and then pop over to email while it all loads up. Generally go through my email, delete the crap, answer the easy stuff, read the hard stuff. Go get coffee while pondering the harder emails, come back, answer the ones I've thought about, read morning websites, answer the rest.
Generally then I get sucked down into the seventh level of he.. er, rather, an meeting about something I don't give a sh^H^H^H care deeply about.
I'm required to carry my laptop home or lock it up; I can't leave it powered over night. I either shutdown or hibernate it at the end of the day. We all would like to believe in this day and age that OS's and applications do not leak memory or become unstable but the fact is that they do. I find that periodically cold-booting my computer keeps things fast and stable. I usually have things to do while waiting for it to boot so it is not really a hardship or loss of productive time. I also find that having to shut down at quitting time forces me to take note of what I was doing over the course of the day and stay organized. Instead of performing daily system maintenance over night, happens durring my lunch hour.
yup. first thing is coffee.
after that, check the whiteboard on the door to my office to see where the problems are; when you have 6000+ systems and a cluster in each state and a few overseas, their is always a problem somewhere.
If anything is on fire, head to level 2 and check with the nightshift to see what the heck is going on before they escape.
If the fire is local, walk down to the NOC and see whats up, put out fire if appropriate. if it's in Dallas or Seattle or Guam, see the status of the local admin on the ticket queue, get on the phone if I see something they don't; start a team re-tasking operations at the site if it looks like it's going to take a while; downtime is not an option.
if it is Biz as usual, walk in, fire up the computer, and check the infrastructure; check the queue on SMS to see if anything major is being pushed today, basically just look around to see if there is anything that is going to require me to earn my salary.
if everything is smooth, or being handled, check e-mail; then, slashdot until the 10AM meeting.
sometimes I wonder why I retired. then, I remember. Paperwork sucks.
Why, yes, I AM a Pagan Libertarian.
Honesty is the most important quality for a senior admin.
take a crap
I Predict A Riot
First I check to make sure the nightly backups completed properly, *then* I go for coffee.
I'm an IT Manager.
1) First on the list is to go over any emails or voicemails that came in that need my attention. Hopefully there are no emergencies for me to take care of.
2) Go make myself some coffee. Just say "no" to bad office coffee people. We have our own coffee maker in our IT area. I drink most of it.
3) Swing by and say "Hello" to all my people, say good morning, see how everyone is doing, see if anything major is going on that I haven't been emailed about.
4) Get my coffee and relax for a few minutes reading slashdot or wired.com before delving into the day's projects.
5) Meetings!
OK, now with all the qualifiers out of the way, here's what I do first thing:
- Check voice mail. I will only normally have 1 or 2 at the most unless I've had days off, and I also get voice mails via email so it's likely I already heard it.
- Skim emails. Again I keep tabs on email even when not working so there's not normally a ton of new stuff, but I like to look over all of the emails, delete spam, and read important things first or things I've been waiting to hear back on. This is not when I deal with less important emails or write lengthy emails to people.
- Check monitors / logs. For me this means disk space monitors, MRTG bandwidth reports, backup statuses, etc.
- Check my short-term to-do list, normally created the day or two before that gets updated a couple times per week. Start on a project or delegate a project to a co-worker.
- If I'm in a waiting stage on all of my short term projects (waiting for parts to ship or waiting on a vendor or waiting to hear back from upper management) then I will make an effort to follow up on those items to help move it along (check tracking numbers, send "reminder" emails, etc.).
- If all of the above is taken care of, move on to the long-term project list.
My last comment is that some people have very specific ideas of what an "IT Manager" does or should do. Keep in mind that's a very broad term that will vary from organization to organization, mostly depending on the size. Somebody above made a distinction between an IT Manager and a System Administrator, but when your whole team is two people (like mine) those things don't make much difference. Maybe in some organizations IT managers don't get paged, or don't deal with backups, or whatever, but in smaller organizations the manager is also a staff member.(I am a manager)
The network Admins deal with the Sev1's, unless it costs serious dinero, like a cluster going BOOM, and then I get paged. We've had that happen only in practice drills.
I check for escalations to management, which I haven't seen in months, but still, they can come at the most inconvenient times. At my level, it means it's a systemic problem about to land us in trouble with the state DOI, federal SEC, etc., so I'd better get involved. (I feel sorry for you publicly traded entities in that regard - the Government really SOX it to ya, lol!) Management knows up front that while I'm not micro managing them, I'm keeping an eye on things to make sure issues don't get out of control. Again, haven't seen that happen since tax time. Stuff always goes to hell when we get nailed by a cost basis rush. That's usually solved by hiring more outsourced Okies (midwest reps, usually from Oklahoma).
Then, before I hit Slashdot, I walk the floor to make sure people aren't dicking around. Especially team leads and floor managers. Once in a while I'll sit down for 2 hours and take calls. I do it for the PR points - when they see the man on top putting up with the crap assed customers we deal with, it's a morale boost. I know what they're dealing with. And they have no excuse for slacking off. And I VNC right to my office to make sure that I can respond the instant something big requires my attention. I could sit on the phones all day if nothing is going on, because it's so easy for me to be where I need to be at the drop of a hat. Actually, given how much it inspires my workers, I like hitting the phones.
Then there's the proprietary stuff I can't talk about - the meetings with human resources and marketing staff, occasional briefings from our legal department, and coordination of community activities. Plus the odd call from the company's owner from his friggin yacht.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
A question like this asks you to recognize if the interviewer is really asking you the question as stated or are they asking for a dialog. This sounds like a dialog question, meaning they expect you to ask them questions. They are either looking to see your soft-skills or they want to see your ability think logically in a free form flowing question. If they really just want an answer, then I think you need to ask yourself what is the most important thing an IT manager manages? Its not the hardware or the projects or the software. The most important thing an IT manager manages is his/her people. So the first thing you do in the morning needs to be around your people. "I would first remind myself that I am entering work, and that I manage a great team of people each striving to contribute to the goals of this company and their own career and their personal lives. So each person at work has home life issues, good days and bad days. I may be having a bad day. I need to be in tune with myself first, and then I am better able to be in tune with my team mates. Work/life balance, career development, and project schedules all have to be balanced. This self-reminder is the first thing I would do. Then I would focus my day on meeting our commitments and maintaining work/life balance. Daily standup etc." That's what I would say...and what I do.
If I had a coffee pot at work, that would be the first thing to tend to. Otherwise, my morning ritual is similar to parent post:
This ritual takes 10 to 15 minutes, and more than pays for itself by decreasing the number of surprises I run into during the rest of the day. On the average, the part that takes the longest is checking the grapevine, because these kinds of informal networks need to be nurtured.
By 20 minutes into the day, I know what is important for that day and can discuss my priorities with my boss. Sometimes that discussion has included bargaining for a couple of hours to research something that turned up on Slashdot that might be important to our work.
That is stupid, indeed. That's what deep sleep or hibernating modes are for. Such modes use either a trickle of power or none at all, and allow waking up in a very short time.
If he explores all forms and substances Straight homeward to their symbol-essences; He shall not die.
Other two? Which two?
We had trouble with MSI and ECS board dropping like flies, and a few ASUS boards came in with the telltale 'K' caps. There were others. It wasn't just Dell/HP/Compaq/Acer.
And my USR modem just died two weeks ago. It had a 'K' cap in it, bloated. Death. So very young...:-)
I doubt many motherboard, card, or modem manufacturers escaped some exposure, but the ones that actually tested incoming components might, repeat *might* have spotted those. For the majority, it was really just a 'fess up and buck up' situation.
Remember the Seagate 'stiction' back in the old days? Well, maybe you don't. Similar situation.
These things, among others, age IT 'managers' preamturely. Like the politician said, in the IT business, if you want a friend, get a dog.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.