After 8 years doing IT support for a local private elementary school, I have finally given up. I feel like whining and complaining about just how I screwed up and making a lot of excuses about why my mission was a failure, but I'd rather distill the underlying causes into something that I can learn from.
So what went wrong? In a word, pain. Well, actually, insufficient pain.
From the outset, I wanted to introduce the staff to better ways of doing things. I wanted them to use modern techniques and tools to make their lives easier. But the problem was they didn't have a good sense of how bad things were. They had no idea how clean and efficient the outside world is in comparison to the ways they were used to. They didn't know they had a problem, much less understand how my fancy techniques and tools would be better by some metric. Sure, they were in some sort of vague discomfort, but they were not in sufficient pain to drive them to call the IT "doctor".
As time went by, I became part of the landscape. I made sure they had a completely wired facility and got some sweet bargains on equipment. I had some success with implementing solutions to problems they didn't know they had by simply going ahead with projects.
But while the staff went about their business, I constantly leapt to address problems big and small, shielding them from the very fact that things were broken or in need of improvement. I was efficient and effective, taking care of things before the staff were even aware that anything needed taking care of. Like an misguided parent, I protected them from every day to day scrape and bump, so they never knew the realities that lay beyond my safety net. I did not allow them to experience pain.
So what will I do differently next time? There's the rub: I don't yet have an answer to that.
