How do you rate your success as an Administrator? [closed]
Solution 1:
Heh. Mine are a little off the wall. More of how I gauge my own success :)
How well everything is running. Meaning, how much downtime do I incur due to unplanned outages, equipment failures, etc. Sure there's such a thing as a chip dying in a Cisco switch, or a random power supply failing in something else, etc. Force-majeure sort of things, but when I'm at the top of my game, my network should be running like a top. This leads to the second point:
How much preventative maintenance has been accomplished. This means basically, `If I've had time to lean then I've had time to clean.' Are all the logfiles checked? Trending has been done? Have those pesky non-critical disk errors that always pop up before a RAID array dies been investigated and checked? Am I up-to-date on making sure all applied patches for the past month are doing OK? Essentially I'm making sure that I'm being proactive with my gear. Trending and predicting points of failure is a good way to make sure everything is running 5x5.
Hmm. What else.
Have I `trained up' my subordinates? Meaning, if by the name of all that is holy, ALL the Exchange servers fail, can the other network admin, or the junior handle bringing email back up without a tremendous amount of drama? And so on, and so forth.
if I get hit by a meteorite, (hey, before you laugh you should read the news about that German kid who got tagged by one the other day! :) could my team pick up from my notes and documentation and feasibly get by, while interviewing my replacement? Meaning in a quite basic sense; is all my documentation up-to-date? Do I have my boss's trust, comfort of mine and knowledge that if need be, I could take emergency time off for a week or two if need be?
I think you get the gist of where this is going.
To summarize, if my workday consists of training co-workers and subordinates, passing on knowledge, doing a daily log check and focusing PRIMARILY on strategic IT initiatives such as security, tools to make the user's life easier and making the network run.. Oh, I dunno, faster or better or something, then I am "doing well", I suppose.
Eh, kinda rambling, but I warned you in the beginning. :)
Solution 2:
One way to view it is how many users don't have to think about anything IT to get their jobs done.
Solution 3:
From a user perspective, the system administrator is good if they don't have any IT issues prohibiting their productivity.
From a management perspective, the system administrator is good if they're saving the company more than they cost (ie, salary + benefits).
Both of these are hard to quantify, so you need to ask whoever you report to what kind of metrics they measure your performance against. If they're not willing to disclose that, it might be time to brush up the resumé. That's not a snarky statement; you don't want to work somewhere they don't tell you their expectations, right?
Solution 4:
My success as an administrator? How beautiful my systems are. I cannot measure it, and it is strictly subjective.
I know, this is answer is not useful to you. I know my boss needs to care about ROI, additional staff, budget, expense cuts, etc, but I try to forget about these as much as possible. Yes, I help my boss, I understand his problems, but I don't really care about his problems internally. I know ROI cannot make me a successful administrator.