Paul Sterley has been working in the IT industry since 1996. Starting out in a call center, he learned the importance of seeing things from the customer’s perspective. He can dynamically adjust questions and explanations to a level that the customer can understand, and think outside the box when troubleshooting issues. These lessons adapted well to a field consultant role later, where it is also important to solve problems in a timely manner, and maintain happy customers. Paul’s experience evolved further when he moved from the call center role to in-house IT administration. There, he learned about the day-to-day operations and needs of a growing business, and what type of support is needed in that environment. When Paul took the next step and became a field consultant, his prior experience gave him the customer service and troubleshooting skills needed to perform this function well.
In addition to the usual break/fix work for individual users and maintaining server and network environments, Paul has a particular interest and talent for migration projects. Paul has completed many migration projects of different scales, ranging from a 3-person business with one location with a small network and hosted e-mail, to a multinational organization with offices in five different countries, multiple file, e-mail, and application servers in each site.
A simple migration can be completed in an afternoon. The other end of the range requires advanced levels of discovery and planning, the development of a process to migrate in phases while the employees remain productive, and a fallback plan in case of difficulty. Paul can perform most of these functions remotely, and give directions to onsite resources when needed.
While he focuses on project work, Paul has not lost track of the importance of maintenance work and documentation. Keeping a system running once it has been implemented or migrated is just as important as building it. Creating and updating documentation is a key to the success of any IT system, and Paul does this well.
