A few things I learned working as System Enginner

A few things I learned working as System Engineer

I chose my career based on a few things mainly that I love working with technology and I enjoying solving problems. Over the years I have come to see that in addition to all the technical skills that one must possess there are a few things that help immensely along the way.

1) Documentation

This is the most important thing that any administrator\engineer can do. Not only documentation of the systems also complete and timely information of work that you have performed on client systems or systems of your own, if you are an in-house admin. The purpose of this documentation serves as a personal log of the work preformed. Not only to you it can be used by all the constituents of the work process. As admins and technicians  we can rely on syslogs, diagnostics, event manager, and the whole array of monitoring and reporting tools. A person who is not so technically inclined a synopsis of what was done, when and why in clear text can be a valuable resource. It also goes without saying that most admins have to provide some sort of documentation about their daily activites to a boss or as an invoice to a client so take the time out of your day to really think about what has been done why, when and how long. Sometimes after a little review you start to see things that can be done differently and may even save you in a difficult situation.

2) Time Management

Depending on the environment that you work in this is the deciding factor between good admin and a great one. How much time you spend with one client or the other, juggling the different appointments, finding time for internal meetings also research for projects and initiatives in the pipeline; It can seem like your swimming struggling against the currents. Learning how to manage the most valuable resource that you have, your time, is one skill that can make your day a million times easier. One of the keys is prioritization, not just with the standard IT lines one should also take into consideration how the client's business operates. Not all admins have the benefit of working in well defined roles or with service oriented tools such as ITIL In this case it up to the admin herself to understand how to allocate her time. Sometimes a call to a client would would suffice instead spending a entire day to fix a non critical problem. Another key aspect of time management is delegation. Just because you are low in the totem pole of your company doesn't mean there is no way for you to transfer tasks to another party. Why should you spend you day providing user support for a poorly written piece of software ? This is a prefect task should be "delegated" to the developers of that software.

3) Basic Business skills

Being able to translate "its faster" into a numeric value that either saves money or makes money is another factor that can be difference in your career. On the technical side it is very easy to see why one server system is better that the other. By gaining a better understanding of the client , how they use data, their growth and expectations of the IT systems they use, much more efficient systems can be created.

Overcapacity is always a issue that I see. Growth in the system is not really based understanding what the company does  instead it draws on generalized, cookie cutter views of storage, capacity and processing. An extreme example comes to mind of a 2.3 Xeon processor sever system and 64GB of RAM with Windows Server 2008 R2 for a department with 8 users as a file server. This could have been accomplished with a OK processor 4 GB of RAM, a LINUX Distro and SAMBA.