Re: [SAGE] Help! Multiple platforms in a Dell Shop

[Mark Ramm <mark.mchristensen@gmail.com>]

First I understand your plight.   We used to support g4 macs, dell
laptops, hp servers, a couple of Sony vaio's and a grab bag of random
desktops.

The key for us to convince the senior management to change their
policy was to document the turn around time for getting a user back up
and running on our standard platform (where we had hot-spares waiting
to be imaged) vs one of the non-standard computers.   Then anytime
somebody wanted something non-standard, we asked them to sign a
receipt that said our standard end user machine SLA did not apply,
substituting it for the response time of the vendor plus shipping and
1 day internal turn around time.

In general they were giving up a turn around time of approximately 1
hr (during work hours) for a turn around time in the neighborhood of
one or two weeks.   For non-senior people we asked the managers to
also sign that they were made aware of this information.

This didn't end the problem right away, and some people choose to take
the risk.  But it did give us a chance to educate users about the
trade-off's that they were making.   And a few unplanned outages (with
the Sony Vaio's in particular) really enhanced the message we were
trying to send.

One thing I never tried to do was enforce a policy -- only to educate
everyone about the trade-off's that existed.   Eventually people's
managers would go to bat for us, because they weren't willing to risk
a week downtime for one of their key people.

--Mark Ramm
On 1/9/06, Martin Jackson <martin@guyver.demon.co.uk> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I'm looking for some advice or just maybe to vent generally, I'm not
> sure what.
>
> I work in an organisation of just over 130 people with a support staff
> of 4 people, we're an EDA house and our corporate policy is that we
> purchase Dell machines (we know the hardware and have faily good
> relationships with our Dell account managers), the policy is documented
> but our Exec management continually flaunt it i.e. they have Apple Macs
> and they advocate their Apple i-books to their direct reports (which we
> can deal with, Apple users are generally religious about their Mac's)
> but now we've opened another office in a new continent and they have let
> them use Sony Vaios so now we have 3 hardware platforms to deal with. My
> team is having trouble just keeping up with support of the Dell Laptop's
> as well as the server, corpwan & engineering infrastructure as well as
> new projects & request,  note. almost all users have a laptops and they
> can be somewhat troublesome to deal with (the laptops, not th users, I
> mean ;-) ).
>
> I've been accused of abusing using my power by the Exec's by trying to
> enforce the corporate policy of Dell and maybe their right, I attempted
> to enforce the policy in order to minimise the support burden and
> standardise on a supportable base for hardware support and software
> deployment.
>
> What can I do to mitigate this situation? I feel split down the middle
> i.e. people should be able to work with what they're comfortable in
> order to get the best from them and I want our IT Service organisation
> to be business enablers but we're resource constrained and the fewer
> platforms we deal with the better service we can offer our users i.e.
> faster provision, better software & hardware support and repairs, etc.
>
> Cheers
>
> -Martin
>