Question
-
Topic
-
#WWYD: You’ve inherited an IT disaster—where do you start?
Locked[b]Hi TechRepublic members![/b]
I’m Brandon from the editorial team if you don’t recognize my name from reading the site.
Long-time forum readers probably remember the What Would You Do series that we used to run. If you don’t it was a discussion-based column where we would pose IT questions, often drawn from our own experience, to our readers. After giving all of you some time to think it over and post your responses we would write an article that included a few of them.
We haven’t written a WWYD column in a long time, but we’re bringing it back. Here’s our very first scenario for your consideration. The names have been omitted or changed, of course, to protect the tech illiterate and professionally irresponsible.
[b]Sorting out an IT disaster[b/]
You’re working for an MSP and are assigned to a particularly difficult client site. When you get there you find out they had just hired your company and dismissed their in-house IT person, who was essentially completely unqualified for the job.
The IT office is a mess, the server room is a disaster, there’s no discernible rhyme or reason to anything, and there’s very little documentation to help you.
To top it all off the business’ main piece of industry software suffers from constant lag, instability, and unacceptably long hangups during face-to-face client meetings.
It gets better: The office manager is definitely an “IT is magic” kind of person who doesn’t care what’s going wrong or how long it takes to fix it—he wants it working yesterday, giving you very little time to feel the situation out. If you want to keep this client you need to get things up and running fast.
So, where do you begin?
PS: This is a scenario that happened to me several years ago, so if you need some clarifying information I’ll be glad to answer.
-Brandon