Notes from the work
Sanitized field notes from a service desk: identity, automation, and running IT at a mid-sized company.
Seven notes in three days: starting a knowledge base in my first week
How I treated my first week on a service desk as a sprint to understand the environment, and why documentation from day one compounds.
Rolling back a security agent across two hundred machines
Pulling a device inventory, testing the uninstall on myself first, and planning a fleet-wide change by site instead of by hope.
From ad hoc to a plan: organizing a fleet-wide change by site
Merging a device list with a user export to work a rollout site by site, and using vendor support instead of fighting an MFA issue alone.
Write the SOP before you have to do it twice
Two standard operating procedures and a forty-six thousand row report, and why documentation is how a small team scales.
The permissions audit that found an over-broad group
How one question during a support case uncovered a group giving nearly all staff access to a whole site, and hit a device-removal milestone.
When the standard uninstall fails: writing silent removal commands
A record ticket week, and the PowerShell and WMIC commands that removed stubborn software the packaged uninstaller would not.
Autopilot provisioning and the last mile of a rollout
Preparing laptops for new hires with Autopilot, and learning that the hard part of a rollout is never the automation, it is the handoff.
Fixing case routing in a ticketing system
Diagnosing why work was falling through the queues, delivering new-hire IT onboarding myself, and standing up a proper dev toolkit.
How I cut onboarding from 47 minutes to 5
Extending an onboarding script into a batch automation, and the read-only audit that found paid licenses sitting on deactivated accounts.
Connecting the ERP to the automation, and the offboarding gap it exposed
Wiring the ERP into the onboarding script through its API, auditing every user, and finding people who were only partly offboarded.
What three years of tickets told me in my first twelve weeks
Twelve weeks into a new job, I read three years of the help desk's own ticket history to understand the place I'd walked into.