About three components necessary for successful IT work

This short post is an important addition to the How To Take Control of Your Network Infrastructure series. The content of all articles in the cycle and links can be found here.

Why doesn't it work?

If you try to apply the described in this article processes and decisions in your company, then you realize that this may not work for you.

For example, let's take the process of granting access.
To "start" this process you will have to do the following

• agree that all tickets go to you through other technical departments
• get these departments to agree to log all requests that go through them
• oblige heads of non-technical departments to monitor the relevance of these access lists

And how to convince these people to do rather tedious, responsible and, by and large, non-core work? By the way, you are not their boss.

Arguments of expediency and reasonableness may not work because it may not seem so reasonable to others. It is clear that this is usually not your responsibility - to organize all this, it is enough to convince the management. But the thing is, if this is done against the wishes of the employees, it can lead to confrontation and political games. And this, of course, will interfere with effective work.

It seems obvious to me that if you have a team of professionals, then decisions that involve joint action are better taken together and together find the best. But for this, something else must be present, not only good technical knowledge and knowledge of what process is needed for this.

Everything that has been and will be described in the series of articles “How to take control of the network infrastructure” are proven processes and proven solutions. They work.

The reasons why something is not applicable or not working for you may be different, for example, a different structure of departments in the technical department or other network requirements and of course the decision should be discussed and adapted to your situation, but it is very important that the same and what kind of relationships are cultivated in your company, what style of communication is set by management, what are the general processes.

Three components

This results in nesting:

• You can have a strong team in terms of technical knowledge, but if there are no balanced and clear processes, then you will not be able to effectively benefit from this knowledge.
• You can have a strong technical team and the knowledge and ability to write working processes, but you cannot apply them to the full extent in a given company if there is no appropriate relationship.

That is, we have a certain hierarchy of "knowledge". Let's call them

• Technical Knowledge
• Processes
• Relations

All three components are important, and many modern solutions (for example, the DevOps approach) just assume the development of all three levels. Doesn't work without it.

Source: habr.com