I was hired as the IT Manager to bring order to this chaotic
situation. The story played out from 2006 to 2009. Prior to my
joining, Murray Franklyn Family of Companys (MFC) was a classic case of a
company in need of professional IT management and IT expertise.
MFC is a home builder in
the greater Seattle area. The company is a privately-held
partnership and at the time I was there, employed around 75
full-time employees in Bellevue and at construction sites in
downtown Seattle and various cities on the Eastside.
Due to a number of personnel issues, the previous staff was
terminated leaving only one very junior person to man a "Help
Desk". Needless to say, there was no problem remembering
names.
My immediate objective was to meet with the folks in the trenches
to get first-hand experience with the work that they perform. It
became apparent that this wasn't a one man job so prior to my
onboarding (and without my input), management hired a Mike, an
experienced IT technician as a Systems/Network Administrator along
with Hazel, the Help Desk technician who also coordinated all
activities with Verizon, our cellular provider.
I began a series of meetings with Department Heads to identify
areas of concern and familiarize myself with the application
systems in use. Working with Mike, we
surveyed the network infrastructure to determine the problems people were
having at their workstations. As a team, we identified short
term goals that were focused on upgrading infrastructure and
standardizing on an appropriate hardware/software platform.
Medium term goals centered on developing standards, procedures
and best practices to define how we manage Information
Technology. Did I mention our responsibilities include not only
the home office in Bellevue, the construction trailers in the
field but also telephony and executive management support.
By
far the most exasperating and challenging of these was the
latter. One of the senior partners in the firm asked me to hire a person
dedicated to executive support. This included the partners and
their family members on all gadgets electronic. Marcos proved to
be an excellent find with a customer-service background, a
temperament well suited for the executives and a natural
inquisitiveness that kept him ahead of the curve.
Longer term goals concerned upgrading the Application systems
that were in place to run the business. This included FAST, an ERP
system for home builders from
Constellation
Home Builders, a customer
service application called CSA written by Redmond Technology
Partners, located in Bellevue, and OnBase a document management and retrieval
application from
Hyland Software with workflow capabilities that directly interfaced with FAST
to automatically import documents and reports.
Our short-term goals were completed in a year by purchasing
new HP switches, a
Fortinet
firewall, standardizing on Dell workstations, purchasing new Dell
PowerEdge 2900 series servers for file sharing and email, replacing
dial-in RAS with Internet RAS. Consolidating separate SQL databases
hosted on individual outdated IBM NetFinity PentiumII systems
and moving them to separate SQL instances allowed us to repurposed a
Dell PowerEdge server end eliminate the three NetFinity machines.