War Stories

I've been in similar situations, and it is often very difficult to push back to the customers (end-users) that while you can RCA the problem, you are not authorized to fix it.

A lot of my time now is spent proving negatives where an issue is raised to us and we need to check if it is our problem. If it is not, we often have to provide documentary evidence that it is not us and point the customer to who they need to contact to escalate the issue.

I think the single most important help for me is the fact that my line manager will back us engineers up completely if we have taken an issue as far as we can, and he fields the heat from the customer in that case.

It is difficult not doing something you know will work to fix an issue, but I've learned to be careful to not do anything without cast-iron authorization from the correct person(s), simply as a self-preservation measure.

With AIX-LPAR and all, your's must be a very big and so procedure oriented organisation. So you really have two approaches. One described earlier. ie. Do but dont tell anyone, take care etc.

The other : talk about it to end users, see how you can repeat it again for their benefit. ie. see to it that you become the end users' goto person for problem resolution. Then with your favourite user, try to wangle a seat in a meeting with the authorised vendor and so on. spread your wings man (or woman).

For your information, a recent article I read says that in future more and more IT persons will be away from core IT departments and get embedded in end user departments as co-ordinators, implementors and so on. As and when this happens in your organisation (ie downsizing, out sourcing) you can make the jump.

OK

I thought the original thread title was more appropriate.

Yea, I also thought "Prize of Being an Admin" v. "Price of Being an Admin" conveyed the original posters feelings. (Reverted back to "Prize")

Good story of "researching" on production systems. So people can do anything at anytime at your place?