We are thrilled to announce Isabelle Morley as the winner of the Alemba Best SysAdmin Award 2024! Isabelle, a Senior Service Desk Analyst and System Administrator at a UK Public Sector organization, has been recognized for her exceptional contributions, innovative thinking, and unwavering dedication to excellence in IT Service Management.
In this exclusive interview, we delve into Isabelle’s career journey, her approach to overcoming challenges, and the innovations she has brought to her team. Join us as we celebrate Isabelle's remarkable achievements and gain insights from one of the best in the field.
Congratulations on winning the Alemba Best SysAdmin Award 2024, Isabelle! Can you tell us a little about your role and what a typical day looks like for you?
Thank you! As a Senior Service Desk Analyst, I am responsible for leading the continuous improvement of our Service Desk while also assisting the team with the standard workload of tickets raised by our users. Every day presents new challenges to resolve, whether it is on the system administration side with identifying and making changes to how we operate, or the usual day-to-day resolving of a variety of different IT issues. In the same day, I could be covering our phone line reserved for major issues and developing a new process intended to save the team hours of repetitive work.
What inspired you to pursue a career in system administration, especially within the public sector?
I started at my current workplace as an apprentice and wanted to learn as much as I could, taking every opportunity available to develop my skills. I went to college before starting here for software development as I love the process of creating something new, but there weren’t a lot of chances to do this in my role. After speaking to a couple of people internally, I learned there was a desire for development within our ASM environment to build new processes and improve those previously created.
I shadowed on a few smaller pieces of work and started to help them, enjoying the work I was doing and hungering to take on more. From there, it has only grown through taking on more complex tasks and experimenting in the testing environment. It has been especially useful in my current role, allowing me to make significant changes to how we operate to improve the service we provide to our user base.
What do you enjoy most about your job?
The opportunities for development. I love learning new things and I’m afforded so many chances to do so, whether it is through courses or being given the freedom to sit in with other teams to see what they do and even try some of it for myself. I’ve become familiar with processes and systems I never would have thought about before and it has given me a lot of options for progression.
Your peers mentioned your exceptional problem-solving skills. Can you share an example of a challenging issue you resolved and how you approached it?
I’m currently creating a new workflow to merge some of our existing system access request templates into just one. With how they were set up, any modifications can quite easily cause the flow to stop working correctly or even at all – which has happened previously. It requires updates in multiple places, so it is quite easy to miss one off and cause tasks to go all over the place. This meant the new workflow had to be much easier to configure to provide such an improvement.
I explored a few different options in our testing environment, just through trial and error to see what worked and what didn’t. My first idea was to use lists that were more consistent in how they functioned but upon realising we had over 150 systems that could be chosen, it would actually require a lot more manual work to keep them up to date and could still cause issues if not removed from one list when added to another.
Another flow of ours assigns tickets to different teams not by choosing from a list of tasks, but dynamically assigns a single task based on a field that is filled in on that request. I used this idea to try pushing the flow one step further, by using fields contained within the chosen system’s record (Services, in ASM) to determine where a ticket was assigned. This was something I had never done before, using a field from a CMDB Item in this way, but it is so much easier to make further changes and has helped me find more improvements for other processes we have.
Now, the task routing can be filled in quite easily by anybody during the project phase using two search fields for access and installation, not just system admins. With a tick box to allow it to be requested via the user portal, all it requires is these three fields being filled in on go-live with no additional configuration to let people select it in their requests. I’ve been able to incorporate this into other workflows too to improve them, especially for password resets.
Innovation and streamlining processes were highlighted in your nomination. What are some key projects or innovations you’ve spearheaded that you're particularly proud of?
We have a process where on specific occasions, we will have a lot of new starters on the same day within the same role. We would create a request for each individual starter and enter their details to then progress setting up their access to different systems, sometimes having up to 40 requests that would need creating and completing for these. I worked with my colleague who usually completed these to outline all the required steps and what was no longer needed, as it was rather time consuming and took them away from their other responsibilities.
I then spent an entire workday building a new request flow that was a much better fit, allowing for all the new starters to be listed in one ticket instead and reducing the amount of information that needed manually entering each time. I still remember my colleague asking about only needing to raise the one ticket and when I confirmed they did, they told me it “cut out a third of the process”. Over a year later, the time spent on that day has been saved more times over than I can count.
What advice would you give someone starting out in IT system administration?
To not be afraid of making a mistake. It will happen even when something has already worked flawlessly in a Test version of the system, I know I’ve certainly made a few that I then had to scramble to quickly fix, but you can only get something right if you’ll allow the possibility of getting it wrong. Most of the fun lies in trying something new, to see if it will work or not, and you’ll often learn these systems can do so much more than you expected.
Finally, how does it feel to be recognized by your peers and win this award? What does it mean to you personally and professionally?
It feels great being recognised for the contributions I’ve made and to feel appreciated by those around me. It’s a testament to the hours of work I’ve put in, to the difficulties I have faced and overcome, and the improvements I have made to how we operate. I think there isn’t enough positive feedback in the world, so it’s always nice to see when it happens – and of course, to be on the receiving end of it.
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