Sharing System Admin role - recommendations please? [A Bug's Life]

At work, we have recently had an online reporting system set up. M'colleague and I are sharing the administrator role, and have been trained to set up users and groups for security levels, scheduling jobs, stopping/starting services etc. At the moment, refining security settings and permissions to perform actions on files in certain folders is the bulk of our activity. So far, so good.

What I'm interested to learn about is good strategies for logging the work we do so it is recorded, reproducible, and reduces risk of chaos and confusion; also, ways to communicate and share a workload. We do not currently have any sort of job ticketing/signout system, this is the first time our team has had to manage something like this. If there is software you'd recommend, we do not have authority to install things ourselves but we can ask - I'm as interested in the human side of the processes.

Any top tips or things you wish you had known when starting out on a system like this?

For context: SAP BusinessObjects, 50 user accounts so far.

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I'd suggest a web-based ticketing system that interacts well with email, especially allowing replying to an email to update the ticket cleanly, so often the products clutter the ticket with email guff, or refuse to actually put anything useful in emails, forcing you to open web links instead. No idea about specific software, as I assume you are on Windows.

As far as procedure goes, do you want users to raise tickets, or will you raise them on their behalf? Do you need your changes reviewed. Do you need to produce metrics for management on how you are doing (hopefully not). Do you need to interact with other ticketing systems, like other people's bug reporting systems? What levels of read and write access are needed, is any information sensitive? Do you want it to produce todo lists, visible on a web page, or emailed to you?

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Not sure about all the tasks you mention but for scheduling jobs we have in the past used a fairly straightforward spreadsheet. It needs to cover things like the system id, system area, time & date, frequency, job name, how is it triggered... etc.

I think for users and groups you ought to be ok with a spreadsheet too. At any rate my suggestion would be that you start with that in order to be able to easily & flexibly add to the data you think you need; with a spreadsheet you'll also be able to filter & sort easily too of course. Then as you have more confidence in what data you need and how you need to cut & shuffle it, you can subsequently look at a system solution.

(For context - SAP R/3 and other SAP systems.)

I would start with the simplest thing. If you're co-located, index cards on the wall. If not, http://www.trello.com

Request Tracker. Set aside a day to install it and learn some stuff, and get the book.

Or have a whiteboard and a budget for drywipe pens.

RT is what we use at work - and it's pretty effective. We have quite a lot of different queues - some for more technical roles, others for more adminny things. It does work well with email - though you tend to need at least some use of the web interface to tidy up tickets when they're done. The search interface can be slow, but quite powerful. Perhaps it's overkill if you only want *one* queue?

Stuff which needs to be reproducible on a regular basis tends to get documented in our wiki as well though, rather than having to go find the ticket where you last did it.

A shared email account might be enough for tracking what you're doing, if you can agree a method for filing messages so you can tell if they've been handled or not, or who needs to deal with them.

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For documenting everything, set up a wiki. There's lots of wiki software about, just make sure it's backed up nightly.

Wikis are awesome for just splurging text, and you can edit them into shape later, and organise them how you think best. Their structure will evolve over time.

A wiki and a ticket tracking system. RT is fine. I use trac when I remember it wasn't the easiest to set up, but it comes with a wiki at the same time.

I've always preferred trac to rt. Not sure how you install either on windows, just linux

> Any top tips

Keep things as simple as possible.

You might be interested in TRAC, if you can find someone friendly to install it (or could convince work to let you install it). It's a wiki and has a ticketing system. I think wikis are really useful for this kind of thing. The ISO9000 thing is, like PRINCE2 and the like, a load of nonsense in my opinion but it's the thought that counts and the idea behind it, that it's good to have a document where you record how to do the procedures you do, is a brilliant one, I think. It means there's no need to panic when one of you goes on holiday, and you don't forget that thing that you always forget. I'd say it's the core of doing stuff like this well.

The ticketing system is a bit noddy for a big corporation but for just a small group it's very good, too, and there's roadmaps and stuff, too, for some big overhaul, or whatever, and it's kind of minimal. There's software that can do each of the things it does with more flair and it's nobody's favourite, but it's a good thing for small tasks, I think. I'd show you how we use it at work, but it's behind a firewall (though not really secret, I don't think). I'll try to remember to do some screenshots.

A Bug's Life

Sharing System Admin role - recommendations please?

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