Techno babel, decoded.

Memo to management, When your System Admin tells you the data copy will take 2-5 hours, IT WILL TAKE 2-5 hours!  SHUT UP AND LEAVE THEM ALONE!  Nothing you do is going to speed up the process. For the rest of you, files take time to move.  There are a lot of steps in the process of a file copy, the original must be read, checked for errors and then written in the new location.  Easy and fast on the same computer.  Not so fast when you are doing it over a network, or between sites, or across the internet. We are an impatient group as IT professionals.  We want it now, management wants it yesterday, but realistically 100 gigs of data, over a 10 meg link takes time to move.  So in this scenario, you would be looking at 3 hours, if you were able to use full bandwidth with no errors.  Now lets be realistic, you are in business, you are using your internet, so maybe you get about 25%, of the pipe to dedicate to the data move.  12 hours.  Now consider errors in the transmission, lost pa

I don't know how I can stress this enough.  If you are a system administrator, developer, IT manager, Security tech, or any other back office type technician or administrator, you NEED to keep good documentation.   If you are the SME (Subject Matter Expert) on sanything and you have tips and tricks and special ways of keeping the application running, WRITE IT DOWN! I've worked in many places, and some were excellent in their documentation, others were terrible in their documentation.  Guess what, I worked 3-4 times longer for places that had good documentation as opposed to bad documentation.  If you are a manager or leader, MAKE DOCUMENTATION PART OF THE JOB DESCRIPTION!  Good documentation can save you hundreds of hours of extra work in training new employees and employee headache trying to figure out what someone who left actually used to do. 

Lets talk about leadership for a moment.  Feel free to extrapolate to your current situation is this scenario is not exclusive to IT departments.  When you are in charge of an IT department at a medium to large size organization, there are many things you need to consider before proceeding on projects that would advance your companies mission.  Things like, budget, resources, how it affects ongoing projects, transitioning to new systems, training, etc.   But if you are already paying for the license for software that would make your IT staff functionally better at their jobs, offer better reporting, more efficiency in ongoing maintenance and growth, don't you think you could re prioritize a little bit to make things a little more hectic in the short term but much better in the long term?   When your System Administrators, Developers, Analysts and Mid level managers come to you, LISTEN TO THEM!   If you don't understand their point of view, ASK QUESTIONS!   Your job as a man