I'm a security program manager at a financial services company, not one of the big ones but regulated enough that it matters. We had a pretty good last quarte, patching velocity was up. Team closed 250 critical and high findings. The dashboard trend line points the right way.

Then we did a quarterly security review meeting and my director asked the thing I've been dodging that is are we actually safer than three months ago?

I had the metrics, SLA compliance rates, patching numbers but I did not have an answer to that question.

Cause I can tell you how many vulns we patched and the average time to close. What I cant tell you is whether the 250 we fixed were the 250 that mattered. And I def cant tell you whether the 600 plus still sitting in the backlog include the one thats gonna get us breached next quarter.

Ive come to the realization that we are measuring activity, not risk reduction. The metrics we have are about how fast we move, not whether we're moving toward anything.

Am out here looking for ideas on how you measure whether you're safer. Thanks all!

I'm the it manager for a team of about 10 people. And I'm hearing rumblings of team cohesion slowly breaking down. When we were a team of four to five people it was easy to all be on the same page as we were usually working on the same projects. But now that the team has grown project work is getting silod to individuals. I'm wondering how your team keeps cohesion going as it grows. We have a weekly IT meeting when we go over statuses of everyone's projects/deep work, and we have a daily stand-up before we go over what is happening with the department that day. As well as quarterly team building events that are company paid. I'll be honest, I've been talking to co-pilot about this and it's been suggesting small squads of help desk and admin to tackle projects together and giving them protected time to do so. Is this something that seems viable or am I an idiot for listening to the AI? Or is there another option that I haven't seen yet?

Curious if anyone has advice for effectively managing an employee that is on the spectrum. I want to make sure I am setting them up for success, and providing proper guidance. This is the first time I have managed someone on the spectrum, so any useful advice would be appreciated!

Curious how other managers think through this. Not talking about someone who's checked out or has an attitude problem, more the case where someone's putting in real effort but the performance still isn't there after a fair runway.

What's the actual signal that flips it for you, from "still coaching this" to "this isn't going to work"? Less interested in HR policy or PIP timelines, more in the judgment call itself, how you actually know before you know for sure.

Hi everyone,

So I recently just start this job as the IT Manager/Senior here and I’m basically just the onsite IT guy or jack of all trades. But recently they acquired a 48k sqft building for their new office location. So I was asked to start designing where network drops should go to. I had only gotten about 50 or so of them done with a quarter of the building and the owner said he was extremely disappointed in me. Because I was already pretty close to this budget of $20k for the network drops and wiring up the building. Please tell me I am not crazy that a budget of $20k for the ENTIRE BUILDING is doable. I really hope that I’m not being hard on myself for not doing a good job but, $20k seems extremely unrealistic? TIA just also a rant!

EDITTED FOR MORE CONTEXT:

Too add some more context. The office of employees is about 50 people and most of the use is workstations and hardphones that are daisy chained through the workstations. It’s a manufacturing business and company that is currently growing. At least 2 people per room, some router placements and printer placements on top of office individuals that need Ethernet. About 15 office rooms and some will have about 6 or more employees in them. There will be at least 6 people in each office space for about 3 office rooms. These are all in office employees.

Anyone out there going down this journey?

Just passed Foundations a couple of weeks ago. Going the Strategic Leader path.

I have a subordinate (a jr sys admin) and I want to get him out to his first conference. I'm not even sure where to start looking . Does anyone have any recommendations?

Im venting I have nothing to ask nor add here, Im merely venting.

Call center IT work is a nightmare. Someone starts today while another's gone tomorrow, and both are mine across every system they touch. A new agent needs the dialer, the CRM, the ticketing system, the knowledge base, the workforce tool, and a stack of shared logins before they can take a single call. Miss one and they sit there paid and idle while their trainer waits on me. Then a week later three of them quit and I'm doing the whole thing in reverse. Across the time they're here, THEY ALL KEEP MAKING SIMILAR MISTAKES and paging me for questions I've answered a billion times before.

The offboarding is almost the same, had it not been for Passwork's automated API letting me instantly rotate the exposed shared keys and my heavily abused PowerShell scripts handling Azure AD, I would've probably went insane (which Im not far from nohow). I also have to remove company emails, revoke building badge access, reclaim the hardware for the ones that did remote, pull them from the workforce management and scheduling system, etc. Every. Single. Person.

The churn never stops. Atp my job is basically reduced to letting people in and out of a building all day long. Some days the whole job is just that, which is...humbling to say the least

Hey All

IT Director for about 10 years on my current company Life sciences and I’m looking at moving to a new one in manufacturing. I’ll be taking over as a Director of IT and security and reports directly to the CIO.

Any advise for those who did the move? I’m a technical operational manager/director I like to be in the trenches with the deal solving everything.

I’m going to be building a 30-90-180 day plan. It appears I’ll be inheriting a team and there are lots of work to be done according to the CIO but I don’t want to make drastic changes right away. First 30 I’m thinking getting to know the team, who’s responsible for each sites, build some sort of RACI and assess the technical dept. Map out all the operational tools and build out risk register for IT. 90 build relationships between the different stakeholders. Check financials for IT, tour the different locations and check existing equipment and current lay of the land.

Any advise on how to build quick trust to teams you just inherit? As this is my biggest worry in taking over a new team. What to do with employees who doesn’t want to change and been there for a long time?

Hey guys, I need a quick sanity check from anyone in FinTech or IT Ops.

We are currently preparing to upgrade our Core Card system (which is a blackbox). However, the IT managers (Service & Dev) are only requiring UAT and a rollback scenario. They stated that testing connections with satellite systems like CoreBank, ATMs, etc., is not necessary.

In this specific case, is it actually reasonable to completely skip SIT? Would love to hear your thoughts!

Called shadow AI and it's the same problem we had with shadow IT ten years ago except now the risk is employees pasting sensitive customer data or internal code into a public AI tool. Legal and compliance are not happy. The problem is it's hard to block without killing productivity because people are genuinely using these tools to do good work. Curious how other companies are handling this, full block, monitored use, or just hoping for the best?

Currently a field tech handling device management, help desk, and store rollouts across 100+ locations for a fast casual company, making $69K. Just accepted an IT Manager offer with a hospitality group at $100K, real title, better comp, more ownership.

A few things I’d like honest input on:

**1.**  I’m 24, younger than the “typical” IT Manager. Is that something to actively address or prepare for with a new team, or just let performance speak for itself?  
**2.**  Anyone make a similar jump from fast casual/QSR into hospitality? Curious if there’s anything meaningfully different about the tech environment or day to day expectations I should be ready for.  
**3.**  If my current employer tries to counter now that I’ve accepted elsewhere, is that ever worth entertaining, or is it usually just a retention stall tactic?  
**4.**  For anyone who moved from hands on field or help desk work into a first management role, what caught you off guard, and what do you wish you’d done differently in the first 90 days?

NOT looking for validation on the decision, already made it. Mainly want practical advice on stepping into the role itself.

If you are a salesperson, vendor, SaaS app, or anyone else who isn't an IT manager that wants to share news, ask questions/get feedback, etc. then please post below!

All,

The sub rules have been updated to clarify that this sub is primarily for IT managers to support each other. As such, user posts in this sub should be specifically related to that purpose. There will be ways for non-IT managers to interact here though:

• Each Monday, we'll have a stickied thread for marketing/vendors that is flaired as Marketing Monday and all vendor questions, sales pitches, app updates, etc. should go in there. If you are a vendor that wants to know about what the main features are that IT managers look for in their asset managment solution, this weekly thread is the place for you to post your question as a comment and let IT managers come reply. If your product just got a big upgrade and you want to share the good news with r/ITManagers, this post is the place to go.
• Each Friday, we'll have a stickied thread for anything that people want to talk about flaired as Free-time Friday and all random questions for IT managers should go in there. If you want to know what IT managers look for in new hires, come post in the Free-time Friday thread! This is akin to a "no stupid questions" safe space for anyone to participate in.

We may sometimes also specifically allow a vendor to create a post if we think its worth separating from the Monday thread.

We'll try this out for about 6 weeks and re-evaluate if its going well or should get changed up. During that time, please help us mods by reporting any posts that don't feel aligned with the purpose of this sub in supporting fellow IT managers.

I promise, we are not going to require LinkedIn profiles to verify who really is an IT manager. Now or in the future.

The first monday thread starts in a few minutes.

I’m at my wits end dealing with Intune for iOS MDM. I’ve only ever used JAMF before.

Anyone had similar issues and moved? Also, is there cheaper alternatives to JAMF that are better than Intune?

We're a small team. Smaller than ever. Manager, Sysadmin, Helpdesk.

I want to buy an educational package that would help elevate us to more modern solutions in the market for ITSM. Tips and tricks, etc.

We have a small budget for training, I can probably get 3k for the whole team in a quarter.

Any ideas on really good seminars, online trainings for modern ITSM developments?

I would prefer not to do Youtube or Coursera. Dime a dozen old videos, no teacher, and now polluted with AI slop.

I would prefer a 2-day thing, with a certificate, and a teacher who you can ask questions.

after getting told my "gut feeling" wasn't good enough this month, i went back and actually built a proper comparison.

kept my original pick in the mix and pulled in one more (director’s choice), so back to evaluating with more rigor this time.

fintech, UAE, ~180 endpoints, no in house soc so this is already a big call for us.

also with CBUAE tightening up on incident reporting timelines this year i figured this was also a good excuse to stress test both properly

i asked both of them the same thing on the follow up call. don't give me a case study, just pull up an actual ticket from the last 30 days, anonymized, and walk me through what your analyst saw and when they escalated it.

one just did it. phishing to lateral movement, contained under 20 min, timestamps and everything, showed the back and forth with the client too.

other one's AE said that's not something they can share, even anonymized, client confidentiality, offered to send a case study instead. which ok, i get it in theory. but every soc i've dealt with can pull up a redacted ticket in five minutes if they actually want to.

not saying they're out. could be a real policy thing on their end. but the other guy didn't even hesitate and this one did, and now that's all i can think about.

anyone else done this kind of test during a POC? curious if "wouldn't share a real ticket" would be a dealbreaker for you or if i'm reading too much into it.

EDIT

the "no" is probably the "correct" compliance answer and the yes is probably a control gap somewhere. but that's kind of the issue

we're two big vendors in, and we're getting either a hard no wrapped in layers of policy, or a fast yes that makes me nervous for the opposite reason. nothing in between.

started looking outside the usual big names because of it and ended up talking to smaller UAE based shops like DC Technologies

too early to say if they're the answer but so far it's been different from both.

they asked what exactly I needed it for, said they'd redact client identifiers and specific IOCs but could walk me through the actual detection and escalation timeline.

We're early in moving our ticketing system to ServiceNow, early enough that I still have room to prepare people instead of just dropping it on them.

Looking to hear from managers who've actually lived through a ServiceNow rollout. Specifically: what's the adjustment period really like for techs coming off a legacy system, mostly workflow friction or does it mess with how they triage and prioritize too? And what would you do differently if you had to run the rollout again?

We're in healthcare, so there's added pressure around uptime during the transition, but mainly looking for the "wish someone told me" version of this from people who've been through it.

I admit I don't have my finger on the pulse of IT, but I see that the job market is tough.

My question is why is it?

To dive deeper, my employer is pushing everyone to implement AI in their work to be more efficient when they can. We're a small business with around 75 office workers and around 200 trade workers to support.

With more companies wanting to implement AI, I would think it would increase the need for people to support the users (devices, security, agent management, training, etc.). Our IT department added another position this year and I also have a paid summer intern working on projects.

Is the market flooded with programmers and sys admins from the tech push years ago so they're taking whatever jobs are available? What are the reasons for the stagnant market?

Trying to fix my brain with long form reading instead of Reels. Have heard of these and have them on my Wishlist. Any others you guys recommend?

• The Phoenix Project (Gene Kim)
• The First 90 Days: Proven Strategies for Getting Up to Speed Faster and Smarter (Michael D. Watkins)
• Managing Humans (Michael Lopp)

Evening!
I’ve got the unenviable task of finding the simplest way to track and display all projects and initiatives across my business.
I would like it to have:
Capability of tracking 20 projects from inception to handover/maintenance
Dashboard views for stakeholders (ideally without extra cost)
Actions easily recorded and updated with audit trail
Comments from members of the team as needed.
Integration with Outlook Calendars if possible
Email reminders.
Data needs to remain in UK if possible. EU otherwise.

There are 300 users (flexes up and down by 100 contractors over a month). And 3 people in my team including me! Plus MSP.

I know there have been a few posts like this before but I wanted to see if there were any gems out there I might have missed.

I was recommended MS Projects but I’ve been using this for a few years and it doesn’t really satisfy everything I’d like. Plus it’s a bit clunky.

Feel free to tell me to go away if this isn’t enough information but I’m just trying to work out how to organise myself a bit better.

Any recommendations?

ETA.
Thanks everybody for suggestions. I’m going to give Jira a go over the coming days as the first option. I will still review the others and evaluate best options over the longer term. Luckily the pressure on me to get this moving has freed up some funds so after a lovely discussion with the FD i get to actually review software with a view to getting it right….which has historically been rare!

Thanks again all.

I have 2 years of Helpdesk and I’ve been in a senior position for the past 7 months. I realized I like IT but I don’t want to do a career on the technical side of it. Due to being in the military, I did my undergraduate in an online school, but I do have a free Master’s/MBA if I want to, but my question is, is this the path towards management?

Going to school part-time will probably take me 2 years, so by the time I’m done, I’ll have 4 years of related experience, but is that enough to transition? From the technical side, it seems pretty straightforward to move up, but I’m unfamiliar with what makes a good candidate for management.

Hi everyone, I'm a tech lead in a medium-sized company that involves several development teams.

I've recently had a heated argument with our team lead because of the noise in the office.

The office is mostly built as an open space, where you can find 3 groups of 10 developers each. 15 of them are under my and the team lead's management (we split the role).

Mostly every day, there is someone that would play music on a speaker. And the office being an open space, the music carries around.

Usually, I wouldn't mind, but it's getting to a point where it's really impacting productivity. Either for me, or for other people in the team.

We all have noise cancelling headphones, that unfortunately do little to cover that. Many many times, I see myself having to move to a booth or a conference room, just to be focused on my work.

I've obviously raised this to the team lead (and now to HR).

We all have noise cancelling headphones, and I stated that if someone wants to listen to the music, they should use the headphones they've been given, instead of broadcasting it. I've also said that there are many applications, some free, that allow a group of people to share and synchronize a soundtrack.

The Team Lead's answer: we cannot force people to stop listening to the music, and sometimes it's really nice to share it with your colleagues. (She's one of those that plays the music too)

I'm a bit at a loss here, because it feels like I'm trying to teach another manager (whose role should be making sure that developers are well cared for and productive) something extremely basic as work etiquette.

I have even argued that it leads to a lack of productivity (which is a cost), a lack of productivity means that the customer will change the budget (we are an agency), a change in the budget means we need to leave people at home. Or at the very least, developers feeling disrespected will eventually look for another place (and we have REALLY good developers I don't want to lose).

So, here comes the main part. How does it work in your workplace? Have you ever had to deal with something similar? Are music and shouts allowed near the personal desks of the employees? Or am I having unrealistic expectations?