Hi, my name is Brent… well, actually my name is Christopher Bir. I am currently an IT Systems Engineer for an energy services company with over 20 years of experience that has progressed from being a sixth grader fixing a teacher’s home PC to working at Geek Squad repairing computers and to the present day where I manage a large portion of the company’s IT infrastructure and help wherever there is an IT need.

Back to why I say I am Brent. My company recently adopted DevOps, much like Parts Unlimited in “The Phoenix Project” by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, and George Spafford. Hopefully, you have read this masterpiece that skillfully describes the journey of Parts Unlimited IT moving from being the Wild West to a well-oiled DevOps machine. If you have not, allow me to describe Brent (erm… myself) to you. Brent is the person in IT that everyone needs to go to if they need something done. He doesn’t know how to say no and can never take a vacation without being contacted by someone from the office. One would think Brent is a great team player, but he also is not. Brent’s workload begins to pile up so much that his backlog is causing him to rush through things, leading to disaster after disaster.

Why am I a Brent? To put it plainly, I take pride in the environments that I work in. I have a knack for figuring out new technology extremely quickly with minimum spin-up time. This has led to me taking on way more than I can chew from time to time. Currently, I am acting as the sole network admin, Microsoft Windows expert (AD, Server and Workstation OS), cybersecurity analyst, systems configuration manager, escalations engineer, etc.

I realized just yesterday just how much of a Brent I am. The company is in the middle of a Microsoft 365 adoption project and Teams is our current service being rolled out my responsibility yesterday was to push out Microsoft 365 Apps for Enterprise to our enterprise workstations. This is an easy task since we use Microsoft Endpoint Manager Configuration Manager and I have been managing workstations with it since SMS 2003. The true problem came around when I had to take care of three other tasks at the same time. I prioritized and resolved the issues and got M365 Apps for Enterprise pushed, but it was far later in the day than our original expected deployment time.

My goal for you through my blog is to help you not fall into the position that we Brents get ourselves in. I will share as much of my knowledge as possible to help you get the job done and save the day.