Practical IT advice. With the day job in mind.
Practical IT guidance for people responsible for making technology work.
The archive
Briefings, with the job still in view.
Practical notes, independent views and the occasional complaint about a problem that should have been fixed years ago.
12 briefings
When did you last restore a backup?
A completed backup job is only part of the evidence.
Your AI pilot needs a boring success measure.
A polished demo is a poor substitute for a useful result.
When the temporary fix becomes part of the service
How to document, review and retire a workaround before it becomes an unsupported dependency.
MFA is worth having. The method matters.
Some methods resist phishing better than others.
Before you buy it, try leaving it.
Make the exit test part of the SaaS trial.
Who owns it after the launch meeting?
Agree who makes the decisions, who operates the service and what happens when its owner is unavailable.
Could someone else run it on Monday?
Use a handover test to find the missing instructions.
Handling the quick question that needs a change
Turn an informal request into a clear next step without hiding the impact of the work.
What keeps landing in your IT queue?
Tell us about the recurring problem that deserves a closer look.
Write the change record for the person who reads it at 2am.
A change record earns its keep during the rollback, not at the approval meeting.
Your ticket queue is a design document.
The same request arriving forty times is telling you something about the service, not about the users.