r/ITManagers

Hi everyone. I currently work as IT manager at a healthcare company managing Google workspace, MDM, and entire IT infrastructure that i built from scratch. The job is flexible where i work remote most of the time. The company has been acquired last year and tbere has been some leadership cuts, and the CO0 from the bigger company recently became a CEO (because the previous CEO got fired). This new CEO wanted to cut me because they already have an MSP that does basic IT Helpdesk and account creation (but thats it, IT support basically). I did not want to live with this fear of when I'll be fired so i applied to different jobs as my plan B, and well... plan B worked. I got a job offer as an engineer at a MSP company (12ish people so small business). Congrats right? Not quite. The CEO that wants to fire me is getting fired.

So im in this weird situation where i dont know what the new new CEO will view me as valuable or not, should i say dont take the risk and take that job offer, or I have more interviews so should I not rush anything. MSP position is a good practice for me since I'll be jumping into MS 365 and learn more about how MSP operates (because I also started a side msp business which i only have 2 small clients).

My gut is saying don't do anything and see how good/bad the new new CEO is. I never knew that I would be blessed with this type of joyful situation but its also a difficult decision.

Trying to standardize Apple TV deployments across several office locations.

Right now every room is slightly different mounting, cable routing, placement behind screens, etc.

Individually everything works fine, but at scale it becomes inconsistent and harder to maintain.

Looking for what a proper standardized setup looks like so it doesn’t turn into dozens of variations over time.

For those who are managing the IT Support team, have you implemented any AI tools for your day-to-day (not an AI bot for users)? If you have, what tools are you using, and what have you connected them to?

Edit: to add a little context... I currently manage a team of five. Everyone on my team is located in different locations. We have the typical setup (ITSM, MDM, etc). Our org has been encouraging all the teams to use AI (Claude) if they want to. From my end, I am thinking about connecting our ITSM to Claude, but I was curious if you, fellow managers, use it for anything else to make your lives easier.

I have been in the IT management side of things for a long time (10+ years). And while things have come along way as far as software and tools go I am looking for some cheaper options. Maybe something built into Excel or Google Sheets? I am thinking about leaving the corporate world and start my own MSP… any thoughts or suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

enaku romba naala indha sandegham once you reach 40 in IT you will reach a managerial position after that switching to a non managerial position is very tough. But u will have limited promotion options since u already in top of pyramid oru stagnation aagirum. So 40 ku mela what u plan or will do

Hi,

I'm an IT manager in a small/medium business (150ppl).
We have several external partners also franchise-like entities.

Communication at some departments is often organised via Whatsapp for external parters abroad who do not know any other options. Even privacy sensitive documents like ID's, driver licenses are sent via whatsapp. I told that this is not professional nor acceptable from a privacy/governance/policy point of view. I gave an alternative -> secure sharing via Sharepoint.

Management expect me (as IT support) to also communicate with these partners via 'my personal' whatsapp. I have a company phone + subcription that I also use privately.

I do not like this, because I think it's wrong and I do not want to use my personal whatsapp for business.
Also other things like, no loggin, audit trail, retention, gdpr ,... I suggest communication via business platforms in the future besides mail -> Microsoft Teams and only use whatsapp only as fallback.

I also said that It is ok to use it for now, but, I want it to change in the future. Management seems not really happy about this.

What do you think if I'm right about this or just making a fuz?

18 months into a ZTNA deployment and we are about 40% deployed. The technical side has gone reasonably well, the stall is political.

Every time we go to expand scope to a new business unit, the risk conversation restarts from scratch.

Security frames it as a compliance and breach prevention initiative. Network team frames it as a VPN replacement. Finance wants to understand the ROI relative to what we are spending on the current stack. The business units just want to know if it will break anything.

No one is wrong.

But the initiative loses momentum every time the audience changes because the business case was not built in a way that translates across all four frames simultaneously.

For IT leaders who have run a multi-phase zero trust network access rollout, did you find a single framing that held across all stakeholders, or did you maintain separate narratives per audience? And if you went the separate narratives route, was that sustainable at scale?

We lock down our corporate laptops like fortresses. EDR, DLP, all of it. Then a contractor logs into our HR system from their personal Chrome on a Saturday afternoon and we don't even blink.

You can't install agents on devices you don't own. You can't enforce policies on browsers you don't manage. Half our vendors access shared drives from whatever laptop they bought at Best Buy and we just accept it.

Asked our rep at the last security vendor about monitoring unmanaged browsers and got a blank stare. It's not that the tools are bad, it's that BYOD browser security is the gap nobody's building for.

What are y’all doing about contractors and vendors on personal devices? Just curious. Looks like something that may come to bite.

I just realized I’m paying for way more tools than I expected. Website builder, CRM, invoicing, email, scheduling, analytics, random subscriptions I barely remember signing up for… and now I’m trying to figure out what I actually use versus what’s just quietly charging me every month.

I thought using more tools would make things easier, but now it honestly feels like I’m spending more time managing software than running the business itself.

Has anyone else hit this point? Did you consolidate everything or just accept that this is normal?

Hi all, got a unique situation. To lay it out, I've been in my role for a little over a year and a half doing lifecylce management for a larger company. I supervise the work of one part time intern. I am going to get two more interns in a month or two.

There's also another intern who has been with the company for about three years and continually makes mistakes. Just today, one of my teamates let me know that the intern took a test laptop and prepared it for a new staff person. He makes regular mistakes like this, where I and others often have to clean up after him. For example, he would say he sent out a package but didn't actually do it, and then we have to scrable to finish it. He also does not follow certain processes and does his own thing. He also works five hours a week or less.

Now, my supervisor is beyond overworked, often getting four hours of sleep during on call, so he doesn't have a chance to speak this intern to get his shit together.

This is pure speculation, but I don't think he's all the way there. He's not sociable (even beyond what you'd expect in this field), and we hardly ever know that he's in the office because he prefers to work alone in storage areas.

I don't supervise him so I can't say anything, but the way he does his work is affecting my output and other people on my team because he makes so many mistakes.

Also, another situation. There's a younger guy who's been at the company longer than me To not dox myself, I'll just say I'm knowledgeable about thing 1 and he is knowledgeable about thing 2. I needed to do something related to thing 2 and I wanted him to look it over just as precaution. I imagine it would have taken him 10-15 minutes. He said no and that he trusts me, but I'm concerned because of what could go wrong. So I asked our boss if he should, and our supervisor agreed he should, but when I asked him again, he said he didn't want to. His justification was that the end user is probably going to scream anyway so he'll just wait for that moment. I know some people prefer to plan ahead and others prefer to do nothing until something goes wrong, but it just felt like laziness. I wasn't asking him to do the task at all, just to double check that I did everything right. He's also known on our team for closing among the fewest tickets.

I guess this is slightly a vent post, but I don't know why my supervisor or his supervisor haven't put this guy on some sort of improvement plan or told him he needs to do better work.

Trying to get unused licenses out of our tenant: people who left, accounts that haven't logged in for months, service accounts sitting on premium SKUs. PowerShell works but it's tedious to keep running every quarter.

What's everyone actually using? Native admin center, a tool, script, or just living with the waste?

I am sitting here staring at my screen in absolute horror cannot believe i did this we have been rolling out these real time dashboards tracking ai vs human resolution rates across support teams leaders use it to plan workforce mix how many engineers vs ai agents based on demand forecasts super data driven everyone loves it.

was rushing a quarterly update this morning pulled the last 90 days data to recalibrate the ai human split projections. meant to filter for business hours only since thats when tickets spike but i fat fingered the time range and grabbed full 24x7 including nights when ai handles 85 percent solo because humans are offline.

the model retrained on that skewed data now it shows ai crushing 72 percent of resolutions overall way higher than reality. dashboard auto pushed the new capacity plan to exec view vp operations sees optimal mix is 40 percent humans 60 percent ai down from our current 65 35.

approval workflow kicked in budget team just flagged the headcount reduction for next quarter. 12 engineer roles on the chopping block to fund more ai compute. they are scheduling the all hands to announce tomorrow.

spent all morning trying to rollback but the dashboard logs show i validated the numbers. cto already emailed congratulating the team on efficiency gains. if i come clean now it looks like i am covering my ass after pushing bad data. but letting it ride means real people get laid off because of my idiot filter mistake.

has anyone else accidentally optimized their own team out of jobs with bad metrics need advice before tomorrow or i am done.

Happened two weeks ago and I’m still unsettled by it. Employee was using a personal chatgpt account in chrome, pasting chunks of customer data to draft responses. Totally innocent intent, just trying to be efficient.

Our SIEM, EDR, CASB all saw none of it. The only reason we found out is cause their manager overheard them mention it in the break room.

The whole incident happened inside the browser and our entire security stack was blind to it. Makes me wonder what else were missing that happens in a browser tab.

Anyone else caught something like this? What did you do about it afterward?

Hello all!

I'll try not make this too long, but whoever does read this and can offer any advice I would appreciate it so much.

Long story short, I managed to aquire a Service Desk Manager role just under 3 months ago with this company. I have not worked in IT before, but do have managerial experience in completely different industries, with my main strengths being customer service - I am not technical enough to do a 1st Line support role and above let's say.

This company has been quite chaotic for a number of years, with high turnover of staff and previous managers. I knew this prior to joining, and knew there would be big challenges, as even them offering me the role is something that would ideally of never of happened.

During my first month or two, I really gelled with the team trying to understand all their issues and Bottlenecks, using my previous experience and recent ITIL 4 foundation certainly helped. The main issues were:

- Desk severely understaffed

- All work for reactive

- Upper management have extreme micromanaging of staff

- Personal issues between service desk staff and upper manager (you vs them dynamic)

- Communication is very poor

- Due to the above, staff did not feel appreciated, burnout, no downtime to develop etc

Despite me gelling with the team, 2 members of staff handed in their notice as there were a couple of personal clashes with the upper management/owner - Which the upper management didn't need to pursue, and this has effectively pushed those staff over the edge.

With one of these techs having most of the knowledge, I now have a team who doesn't have anyone to teach. We recently had 2 more 2nd line techs, along with a 1st Line, but the issue is that none of these guys know the companies systems inside and out like the previous techs. The company work with clients on site offering in person support, so sometimes the desk only have one person covering 60 clients with the remote support... The owner (who has a lot of tech knowledge) is always out, but very poor at communication and always blames his staff for lack of development.

Now I'm being put under pressure to deliver progress, and seems like nothing I do is quite enough. I am seeing this as an opportunity to turn a new chapter for the company, but having a new line of staff not tied to the companies previous dramas. But I'm very stressed trying to teach them when I don’t have the technical knowledge, or expertise in navigating the system to even help them direct where to find answers within the tickets.

So yes, this is where I'm at. I just want to help the staff learn, make the desk stable and satisfy the company. But its very hard. The upper management is a big issue, as they constantly blame the desk, don't interact or provide the foundations of support, then wonder why nothing progresses and staff aren't happy. But I feel responsible for this, and notice I'm feeling a lot more anxiety.

So the setup now is this

- Two 2nd line techs (new to company and don't know how to navigate our systems and need to improve technical knowledge)

- One first line tech, but often is out on site rather than in office. Has knowledge, but feels burnout

- One new first line tech starting in 30 days, done A+ but needs to develop 365 knowledge which the majority of our tickets require

Just very stressed as one of the 2nd line techs who's leaving in 5 days knows all the systems and is great, but can't show it all in 5 days.

Overall stressed for the future, but any advice would really appreciate.

Thank you to anyone who's read this 🙏

I’m doing research on security practices at SMBs (20-300 employees) and trying to understand real-world challenges.

For those managing IT at companies without dedicated security teams:

1- What’s your biggest headache around employee security behavior?

Phishing clicks, weak passwords, credential sharing, something else?

2- What tools/processes do you currently use?

Email filters, password managers, training, nothing specific?

3- What would actually help that doesn’t exist yet?

Or is this just not a priority compared to other IT fires?

Any insight will helpful.

Found out today that someone in finance has been running client data through some AI tools I've never even heard of. Dug into the network legs and it turns out marketing quitely signed up for like 3 AI writing tools months ago. Nobody told IT.

I'm sure half of the company is using ChatGpt on their phones for work stuff too. No way to even know.

Leadership keeps telling us to get ahead of AI but won't actually say what that means. My plan right now is to just build an approved list and make people go through IT if they want to use something.

Not great but atleast we'd know what's out there.

For those of you who tried the controlled allow approach, did people actually follow it or did they just keep doing whatever they want?

Had an interesting convo recently with one of my employees and wanted opinions from other managers because honestly im not fu lly sure how to read it...

This guy has been with me for some time now and became one of the most important people in the team. During a casual conversation he mentioned he gets around 4 or 5 LinkedIn recruiter messages per month. I just replied “thats pretty good”... casually (but you already know the undertone.. of what that meant)

Then he says his friends keep telling him he should ask how much these opportunities pay and maybe explore them further

Now, bear in mind he was saying this directly to me, his boss, so it didnt really feel like random conversation. Felt intentional....

I stayed calm and basically said “you can do that, thats fine”. Then there was this long silence for like 2 minutes and eventually I joked “only a month in the new project and already thinking of leaving”.... just to break the tension, he also laughted

Conversation moved on normally after that...

What makes this harder is that we also became somewhat friends outside work. Sometimes we go out casually, grab drinks, talk about life, etc... So the line between work conversation and personal conversation sometimes gets blurry and I dont always know if hes just talking casually as a friend or indirectly trying to communicate something work related....

Another thing is when he joined he was pretty inexperienced professionally. I invested heavily into developing him, around 10k (alot for my economy, im not in USA...) in training/certs plus a lot of my own time mentoring him, teaching him industry specific stuff, processes, tricks, client handling, etc. I dont think employees owe loyalty forever because of that obviously, but if he leaves now it would have a pretty big business impact....

So im trying to understand from a management/psychology perspective what this kind of convo usually means.

Do you guys see this as:
normal market value talk?
subtle salary leverage?
validation seeking?
early signs hes mentally checking out?
or honestly just harmless conversation?

And if he brings this topic up again, how would you handle it?

We have around 20 people, mostly remote, mix of personal laptops and company MacBooks. Shipping hardware is getting expensive and VDI feels like overkill for our size.

What is everyone using these days to secure company data on personal devices without full MDM? Looking for something that actually works for small teams.

Hi everyone,

I’m looking for advice on how to better describe a role that sits between business, IT, vendors, and technology implementation.

In my company, this role is commonly known as BRM, Business Relationship Manager. Within IT, the term makes sense. However, I’ve noticed that when I introduce myself to business areas, vendors, people from other companies, or even people outside work, the term is not always clear and I usually need to explain what it actually

My challenge is that each one gives a different impression.
BRM / Business Relationship Manager feels accurate within IT, but unclear to many business stakeholders.
IT Business Partner feels more understandable, but sometimes sounds too broad or like an internal account manager.
IT Manager is easy to recognize, but it can sound too generic and may imply support, infrastructure, or people management.

How would you describe this kind of role in a way that is clear for business stakeholders, vendors, other companies, and non-IT audiences?
Would you use BRM, IT Business Partner, IT Manager, or another title/description?
I’m especially interested in wording that feels accurate, clear, and not too generic.

It can be for everything, explaining other areas, LinkedIn, vendors, even friends and family.