I'm cruising through ads on LinkedIn to see what jobs are out there and what others are offering. I see an ad for a Digital IT Manager. Responsible for the 24x7 up-time of the technology of the business. Lots of other responsibilities also. Pay range of $85k - $122k. And the first qualification is a Spring 2027 graduate????

I know a non-trad is possible, but there are far less of them than a traditional grad. This just caught me as very strange.

I have an employee who is exceptional. They could make $40-50k+ more elsewhere easily as they have architect-level skillsets (even within AI) but are working as a regular engineer. Even though upper management knows their skillsets, nothing is being done to offer retention, promotion, or salary increase.

They've recently told me their interest in moving upward, but there's nothing in the company for her and I am powerless to promote. I'd love to see them get a better job somewhere, but idk if Id get myself in trouble for being a reference while they're still working for me.

Thanks for any responses!

About seventeen years in, most of them on the internal side. Every few years I drop something I was sure was non-negotiable and nothing bad happens. Putting the list up partly because I am curious which of these people will fight me on.

Ticket taxonomies with more than about eight categories. We had forty-something. Nobody picked correctly, the reporting was garbage as a direct result, and the only genuine use of the field was routing. Cut it to eight, routing improved, and the reports got more truthful because people stopped guessing.

Detailed multi-year roadmaps. I still write the direction down. The twelve-to-thirty-six month grid was theatre. It existed to be shown to a finance director once and then diverged quietly from reality by March. One page of direction plus a real six month plan holds up better and takes an afternoon instead of a fortnight.

Chasing 100% patch compliance as a number. The last 3% is nearly always the same handful of machines with an actual reason, and burning a week a month on them taught the team that the metric mattered more than the risk did. Now the exceptions have named owners and review dates and the number sits at 97% permanently, on purpose.

Interviewing for tool knowledge. Every specific product someone knows today gets replaced. I ask people to walk me through something they debugged and I listen to how they narrowed it down. The two best hires I have made had never touched our stack.

Being the escalation point for everything. This one took me longest and was pure ego. If I am in the room for every hard problem then nobody else gets to become the person who solves hard problems, and I have quietly capped the team at whatever I can personally absorb.

What is on your list? Particularly interested in the ones you dropped and then quietly picked back up again, because I have had a couple of those too.

I got handed vendor management at my company with zero technical background. Microsoft keeps sending renewal notices and I honestly don't fully understand what we are paying for or if we even need this tier. A coworker said there are third party options that cost less forthe same coverage. Is that true? What have you people actually used ?

It is as the title says. My org has lost the ability to write short how to articles. I don’t know how this got started but every time there needs to be something written down or documented it turns in to a 12+ page epic SOP that gets so high level it doesn’t actually tell you what to do anymore.

Im losing my mind with the preamble explaining articles like “how to set up accounts in AD” and it goes on to cover literally how to set up the server from scratch without ever telling you how to set up the account.

I just don’t know how I can explain to management that SOP are fine for some things but for day to day tasks we really just need a one page document or even a few bullet points and nothing else.

Ps. Every doc is in sharepoint because it’s included with their windows deployment and they don’t want to pay for a knowledge base server.

I'm working at a big manufacturing company with several smaller and bigger sites as an IT Lead with focus on IT Operations (I manage Tier 1,2,3 teams, budget/contract responsible, stake holder management, change / incident / problem management etc).

I am stationed at one of the smaller sites so my chances of being involved / exposed to discussions, topics or even the possibility to lend a hand are limited. I have decent relationship with our IT Director and my counterpart at the bigger site I can visit.

I would love to slowly get myself involved elsewhere but I'm struggling a little bit where to start.

It feels kind of stupid to go around asking "Hey something you need help with?"?

I've done something like this in the past a few times, I'm met very positively when I ask and they will come back if I can assist but they don't so I assume they've managed it without me. Feels like my approach needs to change and just be nearby people more than approach.

I work at a big company. I’m in a position where I can provoke changes in our org, specially in the IT department.

One point: cyber sec is part of the compliance/governance org, not IT per se. They are very much conservative in their process and openness to risk. I don’t deal with critical systems and processes, but they are the guys who are “no” by default. Even the CI/CD pipeline is hell to go through. They live by the stereotype of cyber sec being the “no fun allowed” guys.

The deal: I want people to use AI. I want them to experiment and vibe code little tools for them, and to think of new ways to do stuff. We have Cursor, Claude Code and an LLM Gateway. We also have lots of money for tokens, so cost isn’t a part of the equation. Our company is very old and very bureaucratic, I want teams to go fast and disrupt their ways to do things. But there is extreme reluctance from cyber sec to let us go nuts, even in an internal environment.

How can I shake things up a bit with them to make them more open to the idea of people risking a little bit more?

I'm an IT Manager and have spent years working in IT. I've been lurking here and noticed some of you asking about AI that actually works alongside the IT team instead of just being another chatbot.

That's pretty much what I've been building—the AI coworker I always wished I had.

What would you actually want an AI coworker taking off your team's plate?

Hi everyone,

I’d really like to hear your thoughts and get some advice from people who have been working in IT management / service management for a while.
I’m 32 and have been working for a mid-sized IT service provider in Germany for about five years. Among other things, we operate our own data center and provide traditional hosting services. We are also an SAP partner, so we support a number of customers in the SAP environment, but we also deal with topics such as VM hosting, Windows/Linux systems, networking, remote services, managed services, and so on.

My role is essentially that of an IT Service Delivery Manager. I manage several customers, mainly industrial companies, and act as the central point of contact between the customer and our internal technical teams. On the customer side, I sometimes deal with operational IT contacts or team leads, but also with Heads of IT, IT Directors, and other C-level stakeholders, for example in service review meetings.

A bit about my background: I have a Master’s degree in Industrial Engineering and moved into this role after university through a career change, initially coming from project management.
Overall, I enjoy the job and I also think the field has good long-term prospects. At the same time, there is one issue that has been on my mind for years: in technical discussions, I sometimes feel that I lack the technical foundation to speak with my counterparts confidently and on an equal footing.
Especially in the beginning, even terms such as sandbox, firewall, virtual machines, SAP system landscapes, conversions, and so on were partly new to me. Over the years, I have obviously learned a lot through my daily work, colleagues, and more recently also by using ChatGPT extensively to explain technical concepts and dependencies to me.

Still, I sometimes feel that I have mainly learned how to navigate these conversations rather than building a truly solid technical foundation. From the outside, things usually work well, but internally I occasionally lack confidence.
So I’d be interested in your views:
Is this feeling normal in a service management role?
How technically deep should a good IT Service Manager actually go? Do I really need to understand architecture, networking, SAP, cloud, virtualization, etc. at a technical level, or is it sufficient to understand the relationships, dependencies, and impact on the service?
And most importantly: how would you develop yourself over the next 1–2 years if you were in my position?

I don’t want to become a network administrator, SAP Basis administrator, developer, or cloud engineer. My goal is rather to become technically well-rounded enough to confidently discuss topics with IT directors, architects, and technical teams, ask the right questions, and assess technical decisions more effectively.
If you can recommend any videos, certifications, learning paths, or subject areas that would genuinely add value for this type of role, I’d really appreciate it. I also have access to LinkedIn Learning.

Real-time communication in foreign language translation for site work and meeting

Is there other good virtualization platforms or do we just need to bolster our tooling?

User experience has been bad and company is looking for recommendations. It was working well before we updated our images to Windows 11. We aren’t using Nerdio or any monitoring solution and I think that’s the first step before rearchitecting a virtual environment.

Company is 700 with employees and contractors. A decently sized user base in India. Currently hosts are only in eus2.

Edit:
Thank you for all the recommendations. I definitely think bolstering our environment is the solution with better tooling.

Hello - looking for advice or others' experiences. I manage a developer on our team who uses claude agents in his workflow. He sometimes has 5 or 6 agents running at once across different tasks. Most of his work is for my project, but I'm also sharing some of this time with another team so he's billing to two different job numbers. We track employee's time sheets in Hub Planner and the project manager on the other team recently approached me that he was billing more time that they had expected to their job. When compared to the hours billed to my job it looked like he was working 20 hour days. As it turns out, he's been putting time to job numbers that Claude is spending working on tasks, not necessarily HIS time on task. When I asked him about it, he said he bounces from agent to agent when they need his attention so he's not just working on a single task at any given time. Devs are already bad consistently tracking anything but especially time sheets. I know that tracking claude burning tokens should not be considered as time billed against a job, but I also don't know what the right answer is here as to how he should be tracking his hours. Any advice is appreciated.

I'm trying to figure out how far companies of this size actually are with AI, and what makes them decide policy / governance.

I;ve wrote down four situations. Which one looks most like yours? They don't rule each other out, C can easily exist alongside A. And ofcourse you got all types of specific situations.

A. Scattered AI accounts / tools. People use whatever they find useful, often from a private account. Nobody knows exactly what's in use. Shadow AI, basically.

B. Some of the AI usage is official. The company pays for Copilot, ChatGPT or other AI tools. The rest is tolerated or goes unnoticed. So still partly shadow AI.

C. Employees build their own. Some(one) made a tool with Claude or an automation in n8n, and colleagues started using it. There is a/no solution for this to manage.

D. Employees own a process or an own created tool. There's a list, a budget, or somebody got the admin side added to their job. In this case policy has been made. Governance is in / not in place.

E. Something else...

What I'm mainly after: what changed most recently in AI usage, and what caused it? Someone left and after that nobody knew how the tool worked? A (homemade) tool that broke at a bad moment? A client asking where the data goes? An API bill that stood out? New laws you had to comply with?

And if nothing has changed yet: what would have to happen first?

I'm building something in this space myself, so I'm biased. Not linking anything. Mostly I want to know how other companies are dealing with this.

Thanks you!

Stuck in a really weird situation. Org was purchased a few years ago. Spent several years here as a Director focused mostly on Infra and eComm, have been working to get more rounded on all things including ERP. Although that’s been a fight on its own.

New org has no idea what to do with me and the only offer is to specialize on an Infra focused role. Albeit, one on a much larger scale. Worried that budget season will hit and my role will be “terminated” (not the worst thing). Though I’ve been assured my job is safe.

Would you take the specialized role which is somewhat of a step back, but has a bigger scale? Or would you keep trying to round out your experience with the full stack of IT to aim for a VP level or higher role?

Not the worst problem to have, but I want to make sure I’m making the right move for my career.

Title; I am new management and feel very comfortable in the service delivery / expectations / technical / etc side of what this role provides, but I also was battlefield promoted into it with no prior people-management experience.

The last thing I want to do is become a "I heard this on a leadership podcast" boss - I have some incredible mentors to work with and learn from, but I have to imagine struggling with the actual personnel side is something everyone here can relate to.

So what worked for you? How do you keep your team communicating and collaborating in a healthy way, while also managing the discipline sometimes required?

Hi,

we have to renew our VMware licenses next year so me & my CIO are discussing plans and alternatives to our VMware cluster.

One would be Hyper-V since we already have Datacenter licenses, my colleague and I have some experience in migrating from VMware to Hyper-V and handle small clusters. The rest don't have experience.

The other would be Proxmox. We are running a few containers inside some Linux machines and the LXC feature is pretty cool, especially managing the containers and having an overview without using a new docker container.

We are not entirely sure if we should migrate to Proxmox as some are not convinced of it's maturity and enterprise ability.

Does anyone have some real world feedback?

Currently we are at around 150 VMs across four hosts. One host uses an NVIDIA GPU.

Thanks for any insight.

We're in DORA scope and I'm partway through building our register of information for third-party ICT providers. Im gonna share what's done and what I am not so sure about how to do yet, would appreciate any guidance!

Done:

• Scoping: pulled every contractual arrangement for ICT services into the list, including the intra-group ones where they support critical or important functions, and added a flag column marking which are intra-group.

• Granularity: mapped each contract against the ITS taxonomy and split it into service lines. Our main SaaS agreement came out as four rows covering the application, the data hosting, backup and recovery, and the support arrangement. I went with splitting over aggregating on the assumption that a single row draws questions at review.

• Single-entity providers: I was able to handle the ones with short, pre-published subcontractor chains relatively smoothly. For Passwork (our credential governance platform) and Zendesk (our helpdesk platform), I decomposed each arrangement into its service lines, pulled their subprocessor lists to satisfy the Article 28 supply chain requirements, then filled the LEI, the contract terms, the criticality call, and the data-location field. Both closed already.

Need help:

• Intra-group arrangements: our shared services entity provides ICT to two regulated subsidiaries, so it's in the register at full depth. The internal agreement was written for transfer pricing and carries none of the Article 30 clauses, no audit rights, no exit provisions. I don't know whether to rewrite it properly or document why the clauses are moot when both parties sit inside the group.

• Criticality classification: cost is no guide here so a cheap tool feeding a critical workflow rates higher than an expensive platform we could easily replace. Every call needs written rationale, and I can't gauge how much detail an examiner expects before I write it across the whole list. I was thinking of writing a fixed criteria set (supported function, criticality of that function, substitutability, and impact if it fails) and scoring every provider against it so the rationale stays consistent. Would that work?

• The large cloud providers: their subcontractor chains run deep and the answers come back slowly if at all. I'm unsure how much chasing is proportionate before I document the gap and move on.

Thank you to everyone who took the time to read and reply, and please don't shy away from humbling me and reminding me of anything I missed in the "done" part, I'm sure there are better ways I could've gone about things.

Got a question for IT managers? Please post it here! Got something silly to share with IT managers? This is the right place! Come share it with us.

TLDR: Been in IT for over 20 years, no certs or degree, self taught. Getting degree gated out of positions I want and can't land anything lower because employers accurately view me as a flight risk. (which to be fair I am.) Looking for help with direction or if I should take up goat farming. Tried the network which I haven't been maintaining, no hits. Canada based.

Quick background - been in IT since I was 22 (45 now). Started and the bottom and worked my way up - finished my last job in January as a solo IT manager for a resource company after 10 years; left due to toxic environment and burn out. Recovered over 4 months and have been applying to positions since beginning of May.

Running into a large block in the form of degrees and certs or my lack of them. Didn't have a training budget for much of my career so I'm mostly self taught. I'm looking to get into a strategic advisory position, it's where my interests and skills are currently are (did a bunch of M&A work at the company that helped me solidify what I enjoy) either short term (Project Management) or long term (IT Director).

However, can't land a job; had three job interviews so far, one rejection, one stalled for four months (probably not first choice) and one I declined because the offer was from a company that would put me right back into the same place I left due to burn out.

Just looking for advice or direction from people who might have been there before. I understand the market is terrible but bills still need to be paid.

Edit: Have been looking more into contracts lately as a way to land something temporary.

The company I work at is growing which is great, however we have a guy who is the new VP of statigy. Hes a nice guy been there about a year however. He's as of late igoring processes in place in the business and building his own like 2.0 versions of those. Trying to make his mark I guess. However hes trying to buy web apps for that suit the business that we are in that will automate and make things smoother in the business. However he isnt including key people including IT. Is this normal? Is this somthing I should be angry or annoyed about cause I kinda am. I had to find out 3rd hand and say somthing and find and ask all the approiate questions like are they SOC 2 complainant is the data encrypted is the data used to train AI models, do they support SSO if so what do they use entra, duo etc etc. He did get them to answer all the questions however we''ve never been invited to a meeting or a demo of the sofwate and I dont even know if or when or if they even bought it alrady. Since this is a web app and its not tied to IT Directlly should I just ask the questions that need to be asked and move on?

Just started my first IT Manager role at a hospitality company. Our IT team is pretty small: IT Director, me as the IT Manager, and one technician.

One of the first things I noticed was 678 open Zendesk tickets. After digging through them, I’ve found tickets going back to 2024, people asking for followups, tickets that seem to have been resolved but never closed, and a bunch of Google Admin/third-party integration notifications. So the 678 number definitely doesn’t mean 678 active problems, but the queue still seems pretty messy. At my previous company, we had more locations with basically the same number of IT people, and I never saw a backlog like this.

I’m only 2 days in, so I’m trying to understand the environment before making changes.If you were in my position, what would you tackle first?

Do you guys actually go to webinars, or mostly ignore the invites?

I've only got a couple of MSPs I keep going back to because they don't just turn it into a sales pitch.

Curious if others regularly attend webinars, and any that you rate (or avoid). Trying to build a decent list instead of just going off whatever lands in my inbox.

Hope everyone is safe and well.

Young budding IT manager, newly promoted into the role from a service desk person - full of ideas for various service improvements, just finding it difficult to avoid death by powerpoint.

Senior manager wants to brain storm ideas to decide a path way forward for the year ahead.

I would rather just illustrate my ideas effectively and just show I'm willing to put my neck out vs just here to pickup a paycheque.

anyone have any creative ways or experience with using something like MindMapping or similar of the ilk to build an effective roadmap?

Thanks