The Inheriting a Mess Episode: When the Building Is Already On Fire, What Do You Do?

Every IT leader has a “day one” story. The moment they opened the server closet, logged into the admin console, or reviewed the vendor contracts and realized the job they were hired for isn’t the job they actually have.In this episode of The Catalyst, we follow Chris Schopf, an IT operations team lead who walked into a new job to find twelve-year-old servers, two unfinished infrastructure projects, and a team that had been poached by the outgoing manager. Then we hear from Leon Adato, a 37-year IT veteran who’s made a career of walking into other people’s messes, and Ned Bellavance, a former consultant who warns that not every mess is actually a mess. Some of it is “purposeful chaos” you just don’t understand yet.What you’ll learn:How to tell the difference between a real disaster and “purposeful chaos” with reasons you don’t understand yetWhy Chris convinced his CEO to stop all projects for two weeks — and how it saved the teamThe three-word business framework that gets IT leaders budget, staff, and permission to fix the mess: revenue, cost, riskWhy learning to “speak business” doesn’t make you less technical — it makes you bilingualFeaturing:Chris Schopf — IT Security Architect Leon Adato — Principal Technical Marketing Engineer, CriblNed Bellavance — Founder, Ned in the Cloud | Podcast Host From Softchoice, a World Wide Technology company — this is The Catalyst.The Catalyst by Softchoice is the podcast dedicated to exploring the intersection of humans and technology.