More than one IT house on a site?

george
1

This sort of thing makes for extremely interesting (and frustrating) experiences.

We do software for $site (four), and also installed some PC’s for use of our software on.

Another IT company also have their fingers in the pie - and this is where things get interesting.

We control internet access. Due to the nature (and layout) of the sites, they don’t have internet breakout at all, and need to connect via VPN to a gateway at our head office.

We installed Symantec Endpoint Protection servers and have the clients update from the servers. No issues so far.

The other IT shop uses McAfee. It is locked down. Any PPTP VPN dialups made from such a PC is terminated immediately (McAfee terminates this, as you can also control whether programs can initiate a dial-up or not). Which means McAfee cannot be updated at all. Which means virus petri dish galore. Also, the lack of PPTP VPN means lack of Internet, and this means some $Bosses and $Bosses_underlings) cannot do their reports via the Internet. Whoops.

I am loth to force an uninstall of McAfee in favour of Symantec, so I have send a complete, detailed explanation of the problem and issues to my Boss and $other_it_company, and also CC’d a couple of damagers.

Yesterday at one of the sites, $luser came to me, asking me to look at $PC. It had McAfee on. It was outdated. And it was full of lovely digital viruses. So I said “I’m so sorry” in my most politest tone, and informed $luser to call $other_it_company as it’s their baby.

Going to be interesting to see what’s going to happen. I don’t know who decided to have two IT houses on one project without a clear guideline of software/hardware/protocols/etc, but that Does. Not. Work. Period. Finish.

Just to prove a point, I forced an uninstall of McAfee on one PC, installed Symantec, and guess what? $person was able to do some work…

Anyways… think the big storm gonna hit next week. Muhuhahaha.

2 Likes
2

Been there. At my last job we had two IT forces for a while. The company had outsourced their IT work to a Canadian company. We were brought in as the replacements as their contract was up soon and there were going to be shown the door. We inherited the whole environment. The process lasted about 2 years but there were lots of butting heads due to how the other company did stuff. An example is they weren’t patching servers on a regular basis if it all. The Domain Controllers hadn’t been updated in about 5 years.

We made it work basically be being super nice to the onsite people. We treated them like us and they treated us like them. And when they finally left we absorbed some of them into our team.

3

Dear Sweet Science in the Lab, this sounds so much like a former client of mine it’s given me PTSD. I wish you the best of luck on getting any of the empty, ignorant heads to A) make a wise decision and/or B) approve any additional funding to keep themselves running.

It never fails to exasperate me how companies who live and die by their computer network refuse to spend any money to keep it at optimum performance.

4

Update : $IT_dept (theirs, not ours) collected two PC’s for a full reinstall of Windows.

When said PC’s arrive back on site, the first thing that got asked from me is the usernames and passwords for the email accounts.

Which I provided, no questions asked.

Second question that got asked was “Where did $user’s emails go to?”

Whoops. Seems that $IT_dept who did the reinstall did not back up the PST file. Buggrit.

As because of space constraints I have decided to let the clients POP all their emails, and not to keep a backup copy - as email backups was never discussed with me. So, sorry, but no emails on that score.

Now there’s a big hoo-ha as our onsite tech got requested to add the email accounts on the PC’s - but he refuses to as it is not his job description - and his manager’s backing him up.

Fun fun fun.

The first opportunity I get, I’m outta this circus. Was fun while it lasted, but now it’s just a PITA trying to have a handle on everything.

1 Like
5

And the kicker to all this?

Seems somebody got suckered into providing emails and internet for free… so my company was shouldering the bill all along.

$Boss is not happy about this, neither is he happy about the extra $site we inherited (see separate thread). Also for mahala services.

Things will change here.

Right now my attitude is “you don’t pay, your job is at the bottom of the queue”.

6

Slow strike is on.

At least I have sent my resume off to a couple of prospective employers.

What galls me the most is that most of the company’s employees are struggling to get by on their salaries, while damagement is ignoring that. One of the days something nasty will happen.

7

And add clueless site technicians to the mix. Fun.

Not happy. Workload doubled, trebled, but salary remained the same. Is going to ask one of our personnel reps to assist - he indicated that company may be doing things wrong when they assigned the extra work to myself.

8

I’d start the chant for you, but I’m guessing you’d rather have something lined up first.

Sorry to hear 'about the mess - luck sent your way.

9

UPDATE : Recently the other IT department started to slack off wrt. software installations, and they used to tell their clients to ask us to do it.

Problem is we’re not getting paid by them to do that sort of stuff. Also I was bumping them to a very low priority, and of course, the inevitable happened, they complained about our performance.

The one manager got ticked off and told them where to stuff it, and that their IT department must do their own work, and not just shift it over to us.

So we’ll see what happens. Classic case of dumb damagers doing project manglement and not getting the IT department involved from the get-go.

10

So much this.

IT is no longer the ancillary “nice-to-have” service that it was in the '90s; these days it is core to just about every business.

2 Likes