Task lists

[plumyeti]

Hi Everyone,

 

Does anyone have anything like daily or weekly task/check list that they stick to?

 

Things like:

• Check backups
  
• Check servers and switches
  
• Check 365 logs
  

 

 

I recently became a one-man-band and would like to know the sort of things I should be doing everyday vs every week.

 

The guy who left didn't really have anything written and evertyhing was very ad-hoc.

 

I am trying to put a bit more organisation into the department for when a new person arives.

 

Prehaps your using some sort of software to keep track of these as a team?

 

Any ideas appriciated as I try to clear up the mess left behind and show the school that I can run the department.

Edited October 13, 2024 by ZeroHour

[jmak]

You're definitely on the right lines. The main item missing from your list is checking updates on client machines - although you might have that covered in your checks on the servers if you're running WSUS. If you've got a managed WiFi system, look at reports on that too. If you haven't got a managed WiFi system, you should get one.

 

My main recommendation would be to try to get some management software in so that you get all of that information on a dashboard and you only need to worry about the services flagged as exceptions.

 

The next step would be to get a help desk system in place. When I was a one man band in a school, I failed to get people to consistently log requests, but I religiously logged all of the issues I dealt with. It helped me to organise my time and prioritise tasks. It also made it very easy to show SLT and governors all the work I'd done to keep things running smoothly.

 

A lot of enterprise platforms for help desk and network management have free or low price offers for small teams, so there are good options out there. Lots of threads on here as a starting point.

 

They had somehow got the impression that I wasn't doing much because things were running smoothly and the staff had gone from being extremely dissatisfied with IT provision to not having any complaints. The list of hundreds of resolved issues I could instantly produce in a report from the help desk system was an eye opener for them. And also for me - it showed me how underappreciated I was and I left soon after, but that's another story. If you get most of what you listed and some of what I mentioned sorted, it'll make a very attractive CV if your school management are too short sighted to realise how valuable you are.

Edited October 13, 2024 by jmak

[jthompson]

Yep, keep an eye on update compliance of client machines if you having tooling to do that. Being able to quickly see which Windows machines are two or more monthlies behind is useful for spotting potential problems tucked away around school.

[Roberto]

Hi Everyone,

 

Does anyone have anything like daily or weekly task/check list that they stick to?

 

Things like:

• Check backups
  
• Check servers and switches
  
• Check 365 logs
  

 

 

I recently became a one-man-band and would like to know the sort of things I should be doing everyday vs every week.

 

The guy who left didn't really have anything written and evertyhing was very ad-hoc.

 

I am trying to put a bit more organisation into the department for when a new person arives.

 

Prehaps your using some sort of software to keep track of these as a team?

 

Any ideas appriciated as I try to clear up the mess left behind and show the school that I can run the department.

 

If you're doing all this by yourself then I'd suggest moving away from "person manully checks xyz logs" daily type model and look into some kind of decent alerting in place so you can focus your limited resources on the exceptions instead of spending valuable time only to see nothing of note happened. That isn't to say you shouldn't review logs periodically of course but this model is all too easily disrupted if it's relying on someone to remember to check a set of logs each morning and for everyone else to not distract them with busywork while they're checking... so it's not really suitable as a primary method of being confident that your backups have worked or that Exchange Online isn't doing something odd, etc.

 

Most backup systems can email you a different type of email if backups fail vs. if they're successful, for example.

Office 365 itself doesn't really have logs because it's made up of a bunch of disparate services but some of the services have extensive logging - so you'd want alerts from Entra ID about serious attempts to breach a username. You can also get emailed alerts about service issues from O365.

 

If you have a service desk ticketing system in place then maybe it supports accepting requests via email, in which case you're not too far away from combining the ability of a service to send an alert by email with your helpdesk system's ability to accept an email and place it in your list of open tickets...

Edited October 14, 2024 by Roberto

[JRA]

Not quite what you're asking but I have a monitor/mini PC up on the wall here with PRTG on it. Monitors switches, servers and a few choice bits live for me. If anything flaps/any alarms it alerts me. If you have nothing like that and a free afternoon in half-term get a tea on and set that up, definitely reassuring to know there's eyes on things.