Recently one of our clients experienced an unexpected deployment of one of their IT employees to serve in the military. This individual was their only IT support person, and he was being deployed for 12-15 months to serve in Operation Iraqi Freedom. This employee would have limited ability to communicate with his family and employer, and wanted to use that limited time to communicate primarily with his family. Management concerns included:
Transfer of critical knowledge about their IT Operations quickly and thoroughly.
Transfer of knowledge concerning business applications in use at their company.
Transfer of software licensing requirements and software renewal timetables.
To enhance the IT function where possible and necessary, but retain the basic architecture created by their employee.
The ability to transition back to the employee when he returned from duty.
CRC-ASPEx deployed one of our Senior Network Engineers to work with our client and specifically with the employee being deployed. We gathered the information we needed to support the network, and diagrammed it accordingly. We established a service agreement that provided 12 hours of onsite support, spread between Monday, Wednesday and Friday; with on call support on the remaining days. We managed and maintained the network, as well as provided help desk and PC support to all end users. During the time of his deployment, significant changes occurred to the network. The primary domain controller failed and needed to be replaced. The existing network was architected without failover capability, and as this outage occurred, we rebuilt the network with failover redundancy.
The employee completed his tour of duty and returned to work after a 15 month deployment. At that time, we worked with him to transition our knowledge of the changes that had been made to the network. He has subsequently returned to his previous role and has resumed control of their network and IT function.