Everything is easy once you know how to do it.
However, tasks you don't know how to do may be considered difficult until you know how to do it.
Often I find myself saying, "You just do this: [insert any LANDesk task here]," to a customer. Of course, I must remind myself that there is no such thing as "You just do this..." because many LANDesk administrators are at different knowledge levels and may or may not know how to do the LANDesk task mentioned. In my fifth year of using LANDesk, it is sometimes difficult to remember what it was like to first see this large Management Suite product for the first time and feel overwhelmed trying to learn it all. Not to mention the fact that the features have increased significantly in the past five years so it is even a bigger suite of tools than it was almost five years ago.
Some of our customers are using the product to the max already but a lot are barely scratching the surface of what they can do for their respective companies with it. There are so many useful tasks that can be done using LANDesk that it is amazing. I love this product and I love working for this company.
Why the lack of training?
Over the passed years, I have noted that a lot of LANDesk administrators have mentioned a lack of having received LANDesk training. I find it so strange that so many that I talk to have not been through a LANDesk training course. While I consider LANDesk Software one of the easier products to use among the Desktop Management products, many features are still difficult to use without training.
I am also disappointed to here when a LANDesk administrator leaves a company and is replaced, then that company has no plans to provide LANDesk training for the replacement administrator. There is so many features (not to mention the ROI from those features) that are missed out on without training an know how to make all the features work.
ROI of Training
Each feature of LANDesk is designed to help your company manage its infrastructure in a way that saves your company money.
- We potentially save corporations money on support costs by providing Remote Control, easily deployed software packages, etc, which makes your support department more effective.
- We potentially save corporations money by tracking software licensing for you.
- We potentially save corporations money by allowing them to quickly provision new machines and re-provision machines that have gone down. Every minute a machine is down, money is lost.
- Our Security Suite product potentially saves corporations money by giving customers not only patch detection and remediation but now we even have a free Patch Process in Process Manager. So we are automating the Patch Management Process for you. (Does anyone NOT TRAINED have this working in their environment yet?)
- Now we save corporations money by providing Power Management.
The list goes on of ways LANDesk saves its customers money by having an excellent ROI. Often, we get reports back that LANDesk saves companies far more money that our software costs.
However, if the features of LANDesk are not used, it is pretty difficult to get any type of Return on Investment (ROI). In order to use our features and to use them in a way that brings the highest ROI, training is recommended.
Yet why are so many LANDesk administrators mentioning that they have not been trained. Our we at LANDesk not making a good sales pitch on how training the LANDesk engineers will help maximize the return on investment of buying our product?
If one goes to the LANDesk Training web site and searches, there are two different trainings for LDMS which appear to be about $2500 each. For a single person, that seems like a lot of money. But for a corporation that has a lot of workstations, that is a few dollars a node to make sure your administrator can better manage those nodes.
How much more of an ROI could you find if you could use a few of the features you are not using?
It is highly likely that the training could result in a greater ROI than a few dollars a node. Our Power Management tool alone is supposed to save more than that. One customer after deploying LANDesk in their evironment but didn't know how to use Software License Monitoring paid found $200,000 dollars of software licenses that they had paid for but didn't need, which they returned.
So what if you as a LANDesk administrator don't know how to use Power Management or Software License Monitoring? Your time is probably maxed out and there is none of it left to learn new features.
Make an effort to prevent attrition among your good LANDesk administrators
Often training occurs and the LANDesk administrator becomes competent, then leaves for another job. If they were a quality employee and a quality LANDesk administrator, the question then becomes why they left. Why did this LANDesk administrator feel like going to work elsewhere.
Even after LANDesk training, it takes a long time to ramp up and become a quality LANDesk administrator. So if you have one, what are you doing to prevent attrition? Is your company prepared to be forced to either 1) pay the cost of training a new LANDesk administrator or 2) not train the new LANDesk administrator and suffer the loss of functionality that comes from the Administrator not know what he is doing, which can cost you $$$ for each node.
What I am saying is that maybe, you should take measures to keep the original quality LANDesk administrator. Is it cheaper to increase this employee's salary and take steps to make them too happy to leave, or is it cheaper to hire a new employee and train the, or if you go the no training route, is it cheaper to pay for a large suite of software that no one in your company knows how to use? Often you find that in the long run, it was cheaper to keep your original LANDesk administrator.
I am not saying that you should never have attrition at the LANDesk administrator position or that there are not reasons an employee will leave that are out of a company's control; what I am saying is that when it is in the company's control, have they thoroughly looked at the pros and cons of trying to keep your current employee vs. the pros and cons of replacing the employee. It may cost your more than you think to have to replace a good LANDesk administrator.