Career move. Getting on. Time for less doing and moving towards directorship. IR35 could have been a consideration as it was the talk just as I moved over.

Apparently my visuals made a client nearly cry the other day lol.

Any clothes would probably help.

This is great news Liv. Super-pleased for you mate.

Reg loves a good cock.

So we were all geared up for an enforced return to the office on Monday. All staff were expected to work in the office for 2 days a week.

I've been doing that anyhow. Fed up working from home. I'll extend my attendance if I'm allowed actually.

But because I'm in IT we have been working getting ready to deal with the onslaught of missing screens, docking stations, printer queue setups, hybrid meeting room AV setups and fuck knows what else.  With 40% attendance target that's 1000 or so people turning up like a first day after 18months at home.  Bear in mind in NI we still have masks worn in shops etc, 2m rules etc. so we have to plan seating around that.

Our own developers and analysts / systems teams who have been 100% at home were throwing a fit about coming in and so was the IT helpdesk people who have been 100% home working (who are under my remit, the devs and analysts are someone else's problem!). Have been fielding moans, complaints, petulance etc.

Have been working flat out with facilities - it's a nightmare for them too - getting signage up, straight handing requests for desk moves etc. (Well the people in my team have...)

Lot of stress and annoyance - all because our chief exec who leaves in January - wanted this under way.

She folded tonight after pressure from politicians and unions. The unions rescinded their acceptance of the H&S plans.  (Our H&S people are actually very good and pragmatic - they are fucked off too as they were not consulted before the 1st Nov date was announced) So the whole bloody show is off. The u-turn will leave her fuming, but fuck her. Was a dick move anyhow. Monumentally bad timing given it's winter.

We have a pile of people working anyhow by virtue of their jobs requiring them to be on site (including most people on my team)- this was tackling some deskbound folk in other depts who have been getting off lightly and a broadsword was used instead of targetting them.

So at least I won't have to think about it now until early Spring hopefully. But the whole thing has royally fucked off a lot of people and a lot of good will has been shat on (we do a lot of IT work out of hours on paid OT but no-one HAS to do it.). I have guys running on fumes since the Summer and this spike of activity was the last fucking straw.

Heh. To be fair we have come out of it looking good. We got 2000 people working from home in a couple of weeks by scaling up our VPN and getting a few hundred laptops out to staff who had no home computer. We effectively enabled the org to keep its back office functions operational pretty much close to 100% at home while our front of line did their thing.

Some CAD users just had to come in as graphical intense apps just don't work too well with VPNs. Some remoted into their workstations but even then the graphical workload is sometimes too much and taking the workstation home wasn't a sol either as they really need LAN performance. But all in all it has worked well.  

We had to roll out MFA for O365 and our VPN using apps etc but it all worked well. We also had to set up a CRM for helpline and food parcel deliveries (I even came out of coding retirement to help out with that one because we had to use the legacy CRM I was the dev architect for way back!!).

Biggest pain was the Windows 10 upgrade which required on-site update because of the 3rd party disc encryption we use. We are kicking that into touch and moving to Bitlocker so we can do it all remotely if it happens again. We had to organise the logistics of hundreds of people booking slots for their upgrade and data migration etc.

But our guys were heroes - kept it all going and made me look good.  

I still maintain for big orgs, in house IT is a viable option if its run properly, particularly if you have a wide range of different applications. If all you use is O365, a CRM and finace/payroll the cloud and outsourcing is of course viable but it isn't always cheaper. We have been benchmarked by outsourcers and we came out cheaper.

Well done Matt.
No doubt you have earned it.

Great news

Congrats Matt! Great news.

Thanks guys.

Great stuff.

That must be a great relief, congratulations

Sounds like you are doing just fine to me mate.