Class in Session: Project Management

I needed to test some software recently and found some old equipment in a corner. Then I noticed there were a lot of spare pieces of equipment laying around in various corners of various rooms. Maybe you have noticed the slow accumulation of equipment over time from previous projects.

If this were my garage, it would be full of tools and left-over pieces. But does this make sense in most modern IT departments? The equipment goes out of date so quickly and has usually been scrounged from dead ‘carcass’
computers. I found disk drives of 30, 40 and 60 Gigabytes that were built in the 2000-2002 era. I found hubs and routers that were 10 Megabit per second and had the old bayonet connectors for coax wiring (circa 1980s). We are not a museum.

Should I trust using these old relics with real data? NO! For test equipment, development or training, maybe, but not if I wanted reliable, day to day operations. I have no problem using them for a machine that I am going to test some software on before I try it on real equipment – unless it requires really new equipment (like most new operating systems and larger applications like databases, email, or web services to name a few).

Have you looked around your office? I have mentioned disaster recovery tips in previous blogs; is your IT department a clutter of this old equipment? Does it look like a hurricane disaster at times? Are you keeping this extra equipment for something specific or because it is still on the books?

Clean up! Your desk, your files, your CDROMs/DVDs, backup tapes, old manuals for computers you threw out years ago, install disks for equipment you can no longer find, help disks and EVERYTHING ELSE YOU HAVE NOT LOOKED AT IN 2+ YEARS! Pass it out, give it to charities, give it to salvage and try to avoid putting it in landfills if possible (check your local government’s recycling guidelines to see if they have programs available to collect e-waste).

You might be surprised how exhilarating this can be!

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