I've performed work for dozens of businesses, huge and tiny. Some with sprawling and complex on premise Microsoft systems running on the latest VMWare stack. Some entirely in that scary cloud. Others cobbled together from string, prayers, and a single spreadsheet. If you are making some common mistakes, or are missing some low hanging fruit, odds are I've seen an example of it and can get you going the right direction. If you feel you are spinning your wheels, struggling for traction or results, I might be able to get down to the root cause. ## Auditing ### Third Party Vendors Many businesses have third party vendors manage components of their IT landscape, but lack the experience or expertise to shop them, or get correct value from them. It can be hard to know if your partners are truly your partners, acting in your interest. Engaging a competitor always results in a sales dance, and results in difficulty making comparisons. It can be helpful to have an independent entity review the situation once in a while. ### Security and Risk Management To remain relevant and achievable to Australian Businesses, I focus on the [[Essential Eight]] I help teams work through the assessment, and advise easy changes with their existing tools and environment to close gaps, and meet these standards. There are some easy wins that many organisations don't know about that provide a large improvement for little effort. For Example: - [[Email]] system configuration with [[DMARC]], [[DKIM]], and [[SPF]] - [[Conditional Access]] Policies ## Consulting ### Work Management Systems It might be a daily checklist, it might be an entire ERP. We all work in a business, but rarely work 'on' the business. Reviewing a process and the time taken on it pays dividends. ### Business Intelligence Making decisions without information and evidence is a gamble. I thoroughly enjoy taking a business' systems existing reporting and data functionality, and pipe it through a more modern system such as Microsoft's [[Power BI]] and [[Fabric]] to answer questions in a business, with automatically updating reports and statistics. ### Root Cause Analysis Things happen. Often bad things. We like to know why and how to make them not happen again. Many of the reports I've received in the past are written by those who never talked to the people involved, but happily charged half a dozen hours to write a report with no actionable outcomes. It is a pet peeve. I prefer to put on a problem management hat and figure out how to prevent the incidents (but will still write the report). ### Team Training Tired of telling people over and over how to do something, and it doesn't happen? Teach me, then I'll have a crack at it. ## Projects ### Network Uplift I'm always amazed by the basic network configuration or issues that people put up with because they don't know better. I'm not a network engineer (though some would argue otherwise), but it's not too hard to sort out the basics for a small business. Fixing up DHCP, DNS, and the configuration through to the ISP is simple and easy to check, and wandering around and chatting to people about 'what's slow and annoying' normally surfaces a bunch of easy wins. Also, ISP provided routers are horrible. Swapping to a basic Unifi piece of kit isn't expensive, and is the first step most businesses would make before having their own IT Team to manage everything. If you're too small to have that team, just go [[Unifi]], everyone under the sun can support it.