u/WorkFoundMyOldAcct

Apologies for the wall of text…

Our phone system is a complete disaster. I need help wrangling it all without disrupting users. To understand my problem, I’ll explain the current process, and hopefully you’ll see how flogged everything is.  

All users receive a company cell phone, and a provisioned physical company office phone with its own office phone number. Clients often only know a user’s office phone number. Since 2020, we’ve forward all users’ physical phone lines to the user’s cell phone. This way, clients call a user’s company phone number, and that user can answer on their cell without the client ever knowing our user’s cell phone number. 

When a user leaves the company, we retire their cellphone, and then re-provision their physical phone and re-circulate their office phone number. Cell phones are managed by Verizon. Desk phones are managed by some old school phone company vendor (useless). 

The problem: we have an antiquated internal process where someone (idk who, maybe executive assistants) drags a specific Exchange public folder called “CONTACT LIST” into a new user’s Outlook contact list, so the new user has all company contacts sync’d through Outlook on day 1. 

The actual contact list is COMPLETELY unmanaged. What DOES happen in reality: User A is hired in 2015. At their hire date, they ingest the contact list. In 2018, User B leaves the company. In 2019, User C joins the company and receives User B’s recycled office phone extension. User A, from their cell phone, calls User C to introduce themselves, but their outbound caller ID says “calling User B” because their contact list hasn’t been updated since User B left. SOMEBODY KILL ME. 

This whole process of copy/pasting a public folder contact list is completely untenable. I just don’t know how to fix it for existing users, or how to move forward away from this mess. 

Should I even worry about resolving this for existing users? 

Assuming I scrap this whole process, what’s an appropriate solution to replace it? 

I’m ready to completely change phone vendors, as they don’t do ANYTHING except turn phone provisioning into a 2 hour problem, when a modern solution would be far more efficient. 

What the company needs: users to have everyone’s contact information in their company cell phone at the date of hire. IT needs to be able to recycle phone extensions, and users should see the recycled extension properly updated in their phone contacts to reflect the newest owner of that extension. Somehow…

Title: Technology Operations Analyst

Salary: 170k, highest cost of living area in the US.

My aunt works in HR/recruiting and we were chatting about navigating a career, making good decisions, etc. She told me I need to leave my job because it’s stunting my career growth, given the title I have vs the work I do.

At this point, I’ve basically been relegated to Tier 1 Helpdesk. Before our new IT boss arrived, I was doing the same type of work as a Systems Engineer (but with the same operations analyst title). I would gather user requirements, deploy/manage cloud and on-prem infrastructure, manage all tiers of our software suite from the software patching to hosting servers, licensing and patching across the company, databases, some security stuff (mostly outsourced), as well as the large majority of end user support when our outsourced helpdesk couldn't handle things.

It was a lot, and I knew it, so over the past 3 years, we’ve hired other engineers to cover the blind spots: dedicated DBAs, Software Engineers, Network Engineers, and a Desktop Engineer (though all this guy does is package software in Intune).

At first I was happy with the new headcount in IT. The company finally acknowledged we were severely lacking, so the investment was welcome.

However, at this point, I still have the same title, but most of my work has been taken off my plate, and I’m left handling only end user desktop break/fix support. We have a crazy triage process now, so I am incapable of simply messaging a team mate to ask a question. The response is always “what have you done so far?” or ”Who is asking for this?” or “Have you asked Person A? they’re the owner of this.” and then Person A says “ask Person B”, but Person B was the one who sent me to Person A!

So here I am, an overpaid “Operations Analyst”, fearing that the longer I stay here, the less I’ll be exposed to. Meanwhile, salaries in my area are dropping, and I have a family to support. Leaving seems like too great a risk right now, and taking a paycut is near impossible right now since my family’s lifestyle keeps creeping along (schooling, hobbies, mortgage, etc)

Any advice?

I’m a K street IT leader. I feel grateful to have this job, and I love solving complex IT problems. I’m a hard worker, charismatic, and smart enough to sit in the room with some of you, but one thing has always bothered me...

I talk to partners every day. We might spend 5-10 minutes chatting about work or the weekend, and yet I can feel how far away I am from knowing anything meaningful about them, their lives, or their true personalities.

Perfect example: I coach peewee baseball on the weekends. Been doing it for years, and I‘ve had this one kid on my team for the last 2 years and his mother ALWAYS brought him to practice, to the point I thought she was a single mom or something.

Just a few months ago, I see one of the top equity partners at my firm in the bleachers during a game, and I thought “wtf is David doing here, and in jeans and a tee? HUH?!?” I go say hi, and I come to find out I’ve been coaching this partner’s kid for two fucking years. He also had zero idea I coached (how could he?)

I stand five feet from these people’s faces when I talk to them in the office, and still it’s like we’re worlds apart. It’s creepy and mystifying all at the same time.

For you high up partners, wtf is your life? Help me understand why your every minute is so important to you (beyond the obvious answers- I know about a billable hour). I’m so confused about why you call me in tears asking me to recover a document, or why you’re so mad at (gestures broadly at everything) to the point you haven’t taken a breath to continue yelling at (gestures broadly at everyone)… I’m in the same building as you, yet I feel like we have such little in common that it’s like I work for aliens...

I’ve never built out this corner of Intune before, so apologies in advance. Right now, it appears that my end users’ MS Word customizations (like ribbon/Quick Access Toolbar) are getting reverted back to a default config every few days.

At a minimum, we need every newly deployed machine to have the default company Normal.dot settings, but we definitely don’t want to overwrite user settings...

has anyone encountered this conundrum before, and how did you address it? We are deploying laptops via autopilot.