How to handle one-man department refusing to expand

manpreet Best Answer 2 years ago

The Situation

The company is a start-up, and is approaching the 50-employee milestone.

We have an IT Guy who handles hardware for the entire company - workstations, on-site and off-site servers, you name it. He often works odd hours due to the need to take down infrastructure that we rely on during the day, which means he is often unavailable to address problems that arise during the workday. Small problems, such as a dying PC fan, that should be fairly easy to deal with go unaddressed for months, if he ever gets around to them. Larger issues, like upgrading a dev server, may get held up for months. In other words, there's too much work for one IT person to accomplish, even if they regularly work 50-60 hours/week.

Every time anyone mentions hiring a second IT person to him, IT Guy clams up. So far, there hasn't been a productive conversation with him about getting, for example, a junior IT person to take over the small, day-to-day stuff.

Upper management is not ready to press the issue. Basically, when IT Guy clams up, they let it slide. They've done this so often that my manager won't even bother bringing it up.

Now the clincher. I'm not a management employee, just one of the programmers.

The Question

As a non-management employee directly affected by IT Guy not being able to cover his responsibilities, what can I do to try to get upper management to do something to address the problem?

manpreet 2 years ago

Don't push this too far, it's not your business. If you have an issue with the machine you use, then pressure for that to get fixed. Complaining overall about the IT guy not being able to handle his job, however well meant is not going to go down well with some people. You may not be aware of all the facts.

I handle much more than 50 machines, servers and peripherals in multiple locations without too many problems except for those times when everything decides to break at once, and even then I handle it.

Mention it to your manager if you feel the need, but I would advise not taking it further than that. This is an issue that management are already aware of, it's up to them to fix it, not you.