Most of what I do in IT is a lot of fun to me but there is one part of my chosen field that is a bit of a hassle. I have never enjoyed going to customer sites.
The great majority of my classes are run in my office in midtown Manhattan but on rare occasions I have to travel to a customer’s location to teach a class in their own training facility. One of the main reasons I don’t like it is I lose control of the environment. In my office, we do the setup, we maintain the hardware and we know what has been done to things before we even start the class. At someone else’s office I have no real ability to guarantee that things are the way they should be other than through trial and error while I am testing/running the class.
Why am I sharing this with you now? Well, I am at an onsite this week attempting to make sure that the class is set up correctly (not easy to do while writing a blog entry let me tell you). It makes me think about what we do so I wanted to share my concerns. Am I just whining because I am a self centered person? Probably a little but I do feel that there is an underlying message here. To be successful in IT means to control the hardware and software that is installed in your environment. If you are lucky enough to just work someplace and never have to go to another location, it means that you should have a lot of knowledge of everything that is going on there so that there are never any surprises.
If on the other hand, you are one of the many consultants that support (hopefully) lots of paying clients or you are in a company that has a lot of sites it means that you MUST do every possible thing that you can to insure that you know as much about their network as you do about your own. Try to put in place controlling mechanisms, either through security settings in group policy or through written directives so that you can be aware of any changes that may affect what you are trying to do.
What are some of the things you have run into when trying to support a remote location? Any tips or favorite things to keep them in line?
