In the New Yorker version, two professors are looking at a blackboard full of equations, with "Then a miracle occurs" in the middle. One says "I think you should be more explicit here in step two".
In the South Park version, gnomes have a plan to run a corporation. The plan is:
Phase 1: Collect Underpants
Phase 2: ?
Phase 3: Profit!
Every software product with a greater level of complexity than notepad.exe has a step two... there might be services to help you through it, or you might be on your own, but its existence should be recognized and planned for. If someone's saying it's easy, it probably is... for them, because they live in that product and have deep thoughts about the problem set it's designed to solve. For everyone else, particularly the folks who inherit someone else's environment, there's three questions to ask:
- Do you know how to do the task at hand without the tool's help? If you don't, you need to learn that first... LANDesk OS Deployment doesn't make any sense if you don't know what sysprep is, for instance. Besides, reading manuals is arguably a better use of your time than stealing underpants.
- Do you understand what the tool is doing to make the task easier/safer/cheaper/better? The best tools try to make "Phase 2" as small as possible, but they're all designed with the assumption that you already know the lay of the land.
- Do you have the resources allocated for doing step two? It might be training, it might be headcount, it might just be a block of uninterrupted time... but you probably need something, and you aren't going to get it by clicking your heels and wishing hard.
LANDesk's product set is designed to take you from reactive to proactive; but it can't do that for you if you're not able to proactively spend time on it. Dropping everything to work on a customer's problem is great customer service and just what you want from your help desk analysts... but a LANDesk core is intended for use by a sysadmin. Be the BOFH, not the PFY.
