Reader Poll Anecdotes

"What keeps your fellow IT Professionals up at night and occupies their waking thoughts during the day? After reading the complete survey results of this issue's Reader Poll, where we asked you which single task you would remove from your job and why, our first impression was, "a lot." Below you can find an alphabetized listing of the choicest responses to this question. Read on and commiserate."

"A+ tasks (glorified parts changer) -- Unfortunately with the staffing limitations in place, I'll never do away with this task. It doesn't make sense to be interrupted while working on a $200,000 project to change a faulty HDD on a laptop."

"Administrivia -- Everyone I know spends too much time handling administrative tasks that management should own. An example is trying to manage priorities for which projects get attention - allow us to keep focused on the work required."

"Annual picnic planning -- My department consists of a bunch of introverts who love their work, it's very difficult to get them excited about picnics and holiday parties!"

"Answering the same questions over and over about spam in a user's email box. -- because it doesn't matter how many times I explain it, most ordinary people don't understand that i have to allow it to come through, because if we don't, that vital contract or file won't make it to you, so you have to wade through the spam to get to it."

"Arms length training Company executives -- Executives make the decisions without adequately understanding the impact of technology and application changes on the business. For some reason there is a belief that the business and it's technology and applications are independent of each other."

"Being tasked to PM projects -- I am not a project manager, but due to high demands for projects, and continual reductions through outsourcing, there are not enough PM's so we get tasked with that, as well as our normal tasks.""Being the one to investigate "application slowness" -- This is one of those vague things, they want a sniffer to watch things, thinking it might be cabling, network, server, whatever, and if we watch with the sniffer we'll magically be able to resolve whatever is wrong."

"Budget reforecasting based on changes in business units -- Lack of centralized budget planning leads to frequent business unit reforecasting. This in turn shuffles the IT budgets related to those business groups, particularly around project and development spending."

"Change Management Process -- With the new Sarbanes-Oxley requirements that our IT department has implemented, it creates a heavy burden on our whole staff adding much paperwork with no decrease in project workload."

"Dealing with outages due to virus/worm outbreaks -- This is a major pain and causes me to work too many hours. My quality of life is horrible because a new virus or worm comes out on a regular basis."

"Desktop application support -- In the 1920s automobile dealers would provide mechanics who rode around with drivers helping them understand how the automobile worked and should be driven. Do we have those today?""Different priorities between areas of IT -- We are frequently working for different results. On the delivery side we are working to deliver more faster with less. On the technology and planning side they don't appreciate the challenges faced by the business."

"Documentation -- Too much documentation requested for the sake of documentation - no one does anything to manage the documentation. It gets written and lost in the gigabytes of other documents that are not managed and then recreated."

"End user support/phone support -- End users rarely have the skills and confidence to enact even the clearest well thought out policies, procedures and tasks to maintain the systems they are using. It is like walking through knee deep mud working with end users."

"Handling techsupport issues -- Along side with duties of system administration, the IT staff must also handle all techsupport issues. Since the IT staff configured the systems, users assume 1) fixes can be implemented instantly, and 2) all problems are caused by the IT staff."

"Implementing Microsoft Patches / System Updates -- Because it can take your entire day. And it never stops. Most automated patch updating still requires user input which they don't perform or whine incessantly about.""Managing Windows server security -- It takes an inordinate amount of my departments time while also being the single highest point of failure in my job-- when things go wrong with updates it is high profile and the department looks bad and it looks at though my department was asleep at the wheel."

"Politics -- 90% of all morale issues and 50% of all technical issues originate with executive management refusing to accept an accurate assessment of our current needs and resources."

"Project time tracking -- While useful to managers, tracking project time adds just another layer of bureaucracy to every step of my daily job. It cuts down on my efficiency, which I feel reflects poorly on me (and frankly, I hate being inefficient)."

"Providing support for personal products utilized in the office (i.e., PDAs) - Too many different products and programs. Would prefer to support only company purchased products or limit support on personal products to company approved brands/vendors."

"Security -- Due in part to lack of vendor responsibility, my time can be hijacked by hackers/virus writers at their whim. I have spent as much as 20% of my time dealing with hackers in the past (on a yearly basis).""Security -- Needs a full-time employee to keep up with the constant monitoring, changes, and updates. The risks we take as a company by not investing in that type of position are very real and could affect our ability to service customers."

"Software license management -- So many licensing programs, so many vendors- it is time consuming and frustrating. And never ending."

"Spam -- nuff said."

"The Jack of all Trades Syndrome -- I'm not sure how it is elsewhere, but, here, I find that because I know so many aspects of computing I am also expected to fix the copier, the fax machine, the telephone systems and calculators."