Serious Techy Business Thread

No idea, but one of our suppliers kicked up a proper fuss about having to fill one in recently. A couple of minutes per question and they lose a member of staff for a day or so like you say. We're heavily regulated though and need this sort of shit to be filled in, even if it'll probably never actually be read.

Yeah, it's mostly regulatory. If you're dealing with FCA compliant companies, or those that have ISO27001 etc, it's a necessity.

If it's taking up a lot of time, why don't you just pre-formulate a set of stock responses?

Yes. Its third party supplier management and usually an audit requirement. If you process data on their behalf and it goes walking, thats a problem. We take it *very* seriously. If we sent you to a form and you tried to bill us to fill it in, we would most likely tell you to eat shit and terminate the contract.

No offence, but it sounds like your company does a lot of things arse about face. If its as bad as you say, surely you should have an FTE dealing with admin for client relations? Why does it need a technical person every time if the answers are, presumably, broadly similar on every form? Just get an account manager to do it and escalate as necessary.

As long as it hasn't been held onto by some guy internally for a week plus before it's come to you! In the end we had a process where we had to tell IT immediately when one came in, with the deadline, and they'd assign someone to it to send it back complete by a certain date. You can't really get around it but it sounds like a better process and management of expectations would cause less stress.

Its also a power thing. We are big enough to say 'JFDI' to most suppliers when we are filling out security assessments, application testing, data governance forms and whatnot.

But then when the balance shifts and we start dealing with a microsoft or an amazon, they usually either say 'lol, get fucked' or send a monolithic information packet and say 'here you go, fill it out yourself'.

'We will also need the ability to deploy redcloak rapidly, throughout your environment'

'bongo, can you take an action to see how to make that impossible thing possible?'

Accept it's part of your service provision and incorporate it into your service costs, and equally make sure it's called out as in scope in your contracts. Do you work from MSAs?

The fuckery continues.

So this is what it's like to work on a helpdesk, huh?

I'm sure they won't, in the long run. There'll be a lessons learned, but at the moment, we're just trying to swim in the shitpond they've filled.

As you can probably imagine, there are... issues. No one user is quite the same and so everything is taking extra time to sort out.

It is, to be quite honest, a complete clusterfuck.

Example:

They set a password for all the syncd users (which they sent by plaintext email, lol), but it's not complex enough to meet the stringent requirements of the new tenant, so most people can't change it (it just throws a complexity error). Some users can change it, some can't. Some have synched to Okta (our SSO provider of choice), many haven't. To get it to work, we're having to call each user, reset their password to what it's already set to in AD using admin override, delete them from Okta and resync.

200 odd times. Lovely.

If it was down to me, I'd be hacking off project manager arms with a machete, but it's not.

Can’t your router dashboard show that?

If you’ve only got a 70mb connection and more then a handful of users, it’s not going to take much to choke it.

I had a teams call drop to a supplier last year because they had some updates pushed out and caned their bandwidth.

Just had a bit of a ding dong with our Head of IT Service Delivery.

During our changeover of companies a few months ago, my team did some extended support, because his team was basically non-existent and there was no one to do anything.

That ended 3 months ago, at the end of May. But they're still sending us tons of tickets (mostly for Exchange) every single day, so we've started pushing back. Today, I sent him an email back saying "please send Exchange requests to Infrastructure, my team no longer support this" and he's lost his shit, got his hair right off. It started with "It's one simple task, I don't know why you can't just do it quickly" and ended up with him calling me a "lazy, feckless wanker". In a backed up, text conversation.

It's not my fault you hired fuckwits to support Exchange who don't understand how email works, my dearest. You sort it out.

So, not getting what he wants via the power of unreasonable workplace behaviour, he's gone over my head to my boss to complain, and my boss has said "dogbot is 100% right and is doing what's come down from SLT. You agreed to this". Ha. This being a leader is fun

We have battles like that with email/anything. 'You use it, you run it' conversations with other teams who dont want to do their jobs.

Im currently on a 'let it fail' course of action with BT for similar reasons. We, sadly, do blocked website exceptions. If someone needs access to something and its blocked by the net nanny, we whitelist it with a legitimate business case. If we whitelist it or its already whitelisted, its a network fault and it goes over to BT to diagnose, who immediately refuse to work on it and send it back to us to fault find.

Im now refusing to have my team do that and a few people have hit the fucking roof. Talk to the BT 'relationship owner', guy.

Agreed. I'm staying out of it, though. My boss will deal.