Hybrid Working Made the Office Smaller and the IT Director's Job Bigger
TL;DR: Hybrid working is now permanent, and the IT director's remit has grown with it. Support issues now cross home broadband, cloud platforms and identity services that sit outside IT's direct control. Security has turned into a steady stream of exceptions and governance decisions. Leadership expectations keep rising while team capacity stays the same. Co-managed IT support gives internal teams extra capacity to keep on top of it, so they can concentrate on the work that needs their knowledge of the business.
The rollout phase is over
A few years ago the priority was getting people working from home at all. Laptops had to be built and shipped, business applications had to be reachable from outside the building, and staff needed a workable setup at the kitchen table. For most organisations that work is finished.
What replaced it is less visible. Hybrid working is now a permanent arrangement, and IT directors have found their responsibilities stretching into areas that were never written into the original brief.
One slow application, a dozen possible causes
Take a routine ticket. Someone reports that a line-of-business application is sluggish.
When everyone worked in the office, the investigation usually started and finished inside the corporate network. Now the cause could be a patchy home broadband line or a consumer router in a back bedroom. It could be the cloud platform hosting the application, the identity service handling sign-in, or an endpoint security policy. It could also be something nobody has thought of yet. The edges of the environment IT is responsible for have become much harder to draw.
Support without clear boundaries
That shift changes what day-to-day support involves. Faults are harder to reproduce, and it is less obvious who owns a problem. Investigations pull in broadband providers, software vendors and cloud platforms. The eventual fix may depend on something IT has no direct control over.
The business's expectations have stayed exactly where they were. When something stops working, people still turn to IT for the answer, wherever the fault actually sits.
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Coordinating has overtaken configuring
For many IT directors, a growing share of the week now goes on managing suppliers and business stakeholders. Hands-on technology work gets squeezed into whatever time is left. Hybrid working has sped that trend up considerably.
Security controls are the straightforward part
Security shows this clearly. Modern platforms come with capable tooling for conditional access and device compliance, and switching it on is rarely where the difficulty lies. The time goes on everything that surrounds those controls:
- A director wants to reach company systems from a personal laptop while abroad.
- A supplier needs access to one system for a fortnight.
- A department signs up to a new SaaS tool and brings IT in once the contract is already signed.
- A new starter needs to be productive from home on their first morning.
Each request is manageable on its own. Together they produce a constant flow of decisions, exceptions and governance work, and every one of those needs an owner.
Rising expectations, fixed capacity
So the workload climbs. The number of moving parts keeps growing, and leadership teams want more at the same time. They want stronger security, better reporting, faster support and clear evidence that risk is being properly managed.
Meeting all of that while still delivering projects and keeping daily operations running is a genuine capacity problem. Working longer hours rarely solves it.
We covered a closely related problem recently: finding the time to build a business case for security investment when the day job fills every hour. You can read that piece here.
How co-managed IT support adds capacity
This is a big part of why IT directors are turning to co-managed support. The aim is to add capacity to the team already in place.
A co-managed partner can take on high-volume work such as first-line tickets, access requests, patching and monitoring. That leaves your internal team with more room for the decisions that depend on business context and experience.
Pro-Networks works alongside in-house IT teams at businesses across Chester, Cheshire, Warrington, Wrexham, North Wales and the Wirral. Your team keeps ownership of strategy and priorities. We add the extra hands and hours needed to keep up with everything hybrid working has put on its plate.
Talk to us about extra capacity
If the demands on your IT team are growing faster than the capacity you have to meet them, get in touch with Pro-Networks. We can talk through where your team's time is going and how co-managed support could give some of it back.