Covid-19 IT and Remote Work: An Ideal Outcome

It's a bit late in the game to offer this, but as a very high risk IT Director for an organization that went from a handful of remote workers in 2018 to 50 with support for far more as needed, I thought I'd share some of the ways we used to go from planning to implementation in two weeks and supported my own nearly year long hiatus from the office. First and foremost, recognizing that Covid-19 is a real illness killing folk at far higher rates than any standard flu or vaccine is a must. You cannot make rational decisions unless you are looking at valid data. In the US, the CDC alone has that data and we cannot supplant it with some made up information from random Internet sources. That's all I have to say on that.

Inception

When Covid broke out and the death rates were said to be about 10 times the normal flu rates (that number is now about 15 times), we had a fairly short lead time to implement changes that would permit our essential new home construction business to remain operationally safe for all our staff, customers, and vendors. Masking, sanitization, and social distancing were made mandatory. Anyone at high risk was sent to work remotely from home until vaccinations were obtained and anyone that was exposed or tested positive was sent home to quarantine for 2 weeks. All those folk had to have an option to work remotely. For that piece of the puzzle, we engaged a cloud service provider to enable secure remote access to existing user desktops and provided inexpensive chromebooks, keyboards, mice, monitors, and even cellular hotspots where needed to make that experience reasonably useful. Paper only processes became groupware processes literally overnight. Our entire cost from an IT only perspective was about $13k for the year to enable up to 50 users out of nearly 250 to be remote at a time.

Implementation

The remote access solutions were tested and deployed during a 14 day trial license while we negotiated the procurement. Things like our own remote desktop support options were determined and put into formal processes that could be used to support our new cadre of remote workers. 100% of the corporate workers were immediately supported and field offices rolled in as required. As a business, our founder decided to lean into the low interest rates and frankly made a killing building and selling as many homes as possible before the supply chain kinks started throttling our build rates. From a productivity and efficiency standing, we didn't really miss a beat from an organizational perspective and literally doubled our revenues year on year. From an IT standing, it was a different story. I froze any unnecessary hardware deployments or any lengthy development work to keep from creating huge projects while we were supporting so many disparate locations remotely with reduced in-house staff. I was explicitly restricted from the corporate office or any field sites and spent most of the next year largely in my home with the exception of chemo treatments while having several wife provided haircuts that didn't exactly inspire me to be seen in public anyway.

Post Implementation

By the time I got fully vaccinated and returned to the office, nearly a year had passed. Our business had thrived, but our IT work had suffered from my inability to lay hands on our infrastructure in any meaningful fashion. This was more out of fear that I might break something critical and lack the ability to correct the problem remotely once it was broken. There were new networks to connect and fail-over solutions to put together. There were surge contractors that didn't work out well and a new hire to replace them. Additionally, an entire new business unit was being spun up to recapture some of our sales revenues from the title company we previously used. Two major software development projects had to come off of hold and a hardware refresh needed to be done for our field locations. The remote work option we so hastily fielded worked so well that many of our office workers continue to flex telecommute with our leadership's approval while at least one person was let go for failing to actually get work done while remote. In our IT department we now telecommute one day per week just to help out with work life balance since we are on call every third weekend.

Lessons Learned

First and foremost, as an organization, we learned to lean into change and make it work for us. From an IT standing we learned that some things shouldn't be touched remotely and that our own staffing level was a bit too lean for the support work we were doing. Mostly, we learned that a well vetted solution, even if hastily proscribed and implemented, can be an excellent fit. I actually evaluate solutions we don't use pretty regularly for future reference and to stay current in the field, so when it came time to pick a remote work solution provider, I'd already had a solid pantheon of providers previously explored, and we quickly tapped the one that met all of our requirements without having to do much more than design and validate an implementation while we pushed our software licensing partners for some good pricing. I'm sure other folk have horror stories about failed remote work deployments during Covid-19 and I'm sure that will be riveting night time reading for IT Directors that like to lose sleep, but this isn't one of those and I for one am quite thankful for a very painless transition in both directions. Now, Covid-19 doesn't seem to be going anywhere, so I still have to keep these remote solutions in play and may even have to change directions with them at some point, but in the meantime, I'll take the easy win that was honestly based on a lifetime of hard work maintaining very good current knowledge about the products, solutions, and providers out there that enabled us to move from 100% in the office to 30% or less and back again. You might have noticed I didn't mention the remote solution provider we used. Sorry, but as always, I'm going to leave the hard groundwork of gathering attack vector intelligence to the hackers out there probing our networks every day instead of just giving it away for free. Good luck out there!!!