Zachary Bagnall

At Atlas Cloud my official job title is 3rd line technical team lead, which means I am responsible for the highest support on the service desk if any major issues need to be resolved that the 1st or 2nd line engineers cant do it will be escalated over to myself to undergo the work. I am also responsible for maintaining the team and ensuring they are following the process that has been written to give the customers the best service possible. I work very closely with the service desk and operations manager to ensure we have the right processes in place and are providing the right service.

Within this role I have also been part of other teams using my experiences in previous roles to install equipment onsite, attend sites for issues that customers have, remote and onsite implementations, networking install and troubleshooting and work on a virtualized platform we provide customers.

I have also gained a lot of experience in this role with some technologies I had not used before Such as, Citrix VDI and NetScalers, Azure, Entra ID, Veeam, SQL, etc.

From the helpdesk managers role we split the departments from 1 big service desk to be helpdesk and field engineers, I progressed with this to become the Technical Manager. In this role at first I was responsible for scheduling onsite jobs and ensuring the engineers were attending their jobs ontime to what had been agreed and had all the equipment needed to perform the work required. The role progressed further and I started to manage installations of new equipment or upgrades to machines from a project management point of view. With this I also wrote a process to help better the workflow from the helpdesk to the escalated engineers. After that there was an area in the department that I worked on and created a sub-division within that allowed engineers to undergo escalated issues remotely as well as preparing project equipment on our workbench ready to be installed, I would also get involved in the preparation as and when I was needed.

The role progressed again and rather than just booking in the projects I would manage project from start to finish. I would create a project plan for major installations, suchas, server upgrades, server replacements, cloud migrations, office 365 migrations etc. Within this role it was also my responsibility to manage the workshop jobs as I was the helpdesk manager. I also wrote an official process for this to help the flow of these jobs. I also started to quote for equipment for customers with a certain price range and quoting for replacement hardware parts that are needed for workshop jobs.

From becoming a field engineer there was an opening that I felt I would excel in on the helpdesk when it comes to management, I took on this role and it involved maintaining the flow of tickets that are logged as well as keeping the engineers working and motivated to resolve as many issues as possible. I also wrote a process for the helpdesk that would help the flow of tickets that are logged and help with keeping the customer happy, this was written with the companies SLA in mind. I was also responsible for scheduling onsite jobs for a time within this rile before the helpdesk became more demanding and a dedicated role.

From gaining experience on a helpdesk environment I felt I had now gained the knowledge to start attending sites and resolving customers issues face to face. At first I started attending sites for PC installs and basic troubleshooting and resolutions to then progress to networking issues or servicer issues, as well as onsite troubleshooting and installations for 2 primary schools for a day every 2 weeks that I was chosen for. I was responsible for dealing with the teachers issues and resolving them, implementing new software and maintaining their hardware and network equipment.

After obtaining my qualification during my apprenticeship and completing the courses, I was kept on at SmartIT as a Helpdesk Engineer, I was responsible for taking calls from customers with various IT issues and working to resolve them remotely under a contracted SLA agreement. I was also responsible for maintaining the monitoring systems for any alerts that were flagged on the customers network, The kind of jobs that I was undergoing were varied, some issues were with PCs, some were with servers and others were with networking equipment, all of these were worked on remotely to resolve and if this could not be done remotely it would be escalated to a field engineer for a site visit. I was also responsible for undergoing work on our internal workbench, this could be rebuilding windows operating systems, building PCs from scratch (including hardware), upgrading hardware or software, replacing hardware, etc.

I underwent a level 3 apprenticeship starting in May 2014 and completed June 2015, from this I gained some important qualifications, suchas, Microsoft MTAs, Security, Networking, Operating Systems and Server, that would help me work in the IT industry. The apprenticeship was a great way to get a foot in the IT industry and gain experience as well as qualifications to help me develop a career.

While working in McDonald's restaurant I was responsible for many duties, from serving customers to maintaining cleanliness in and around the restaurant. I was given a great opportunity in this role to speak to customer face to face and deal with many different types of people, this was challenging but very rewarding to my confidence and attitude to work as a young man. I also progressed from working front of house to working in the kitchen preparing food and working on the drive-thru windows dealing with a high volume of customer through peak times and keeping the business flowing.