Nick Gee, Support Engineer Case Study

Nick Gee works within the Service Desk and Incident Team as a now fully qualified Support Engineer alongside 40 other Support Engineers [including apprentices] all with different responsibilities and expertise in the IT and Microsoft industry. Nick has now been working at risual for three years and has excelled in many areas. Nick is a very valued member of the organisation and has also been led to believe that he might be the “IT Genius”, the man with all the exams, the technical knowledge, and the drive and passion to constantly improve. Since starting his apprenticeship, Nick has always stood out from the crowd due to his work ethic and persistence to continue to grow as an individual – which is such a delight to watch. As Nick grows in his career working his way up the risual ladder, he has been able to learn from his team lead and also work with his co-workers to teach, develop and grow them as individuals too. Nick creates new ways of working every day, ensuring that the customers on the other end of the phone are constantly happy with their risual and Managed Services experience.

Nick has worked on a number of projects to help enhance our support model and risual as an organisation. One of the most notable activities Nick has taken to improve our support team as a whole was implementing a whole new scalable test environment, including Office 365, SharePoint Servers, Skype for Business Servers, Exchange Servers, WSUS Servers, SQL Servers and much more. The environment was designed to help with testing customer solutions and trialling changes before carrying them out on a working live environment. Nick took ownership of this piece of work and has helped everyone within the risual Managed Services Department engage with this environment.

Further to this it became apparent that we required a more sustainable long term remote access solution for connecting to end user client machines, and when it did Nick took it upon himself to design and create something that could be tailored to our support team. He articulated a logo for this deployment and set up the tool alongside his Team Leader, again taking ownership for the project and helping transition it in to a live environment, providing advice for both end users on how to use the support tool as well as training our support engineers to utilise the product when troubleshooting client-side issues. The tool was a great success and is used now on a daily basis within risual.

Another commendable offering that Nick provided a customer with was a Citrix solution. As a Microsoft partner, risual do not generally work with third party product implementations as it is not something we as an organisation specialise in, however we had a long-term customer request assistance in deploying Citrix to help with their end user computing, as Nick had already established himself as a go to Citrix engineer through previous work, he stepped up to the plate and insisted it was something he could work on. Nick went on to provide the customer with a Citrix environment along with full documentation on what had been implemented and how it was achieved. The customer was over the moon with what Nick had produced and it helped to build an even tighter relationship with the customer in question.

One of Nicks main qualities is his work ethic. From the day Nick joined risual as an apprentice he stood out and contributed many hours outside of the nine to five to progress himself forward technically and also revising thoroughly focussing on achieving Microsoft Qualifications. Within Nick’s first six months, Nick had passed his MCSE in Windows Server 2012 (5 individual exams) and MCSA in Office 365 (2 individual exams) – these are exams that Microsoft recommend that you have three years prior experience working with the technology before even attempting to take the exams. Nick also showcased a tremendous attitude to his work and revision at the same time of juggling a very high workload, so within his first month he was in the top three case closers within the whole IT department which came as no surprise given Nick’s tenacity to achieve and better himself. He then went on to build on this by being the number one top closer for the remaining 11 months of his apprenticeship and this resonated even now he is a full-time employee within risual.

After his apprenticeship ended, Nick worked as an engineer for a year and in that time, continued to volunteer for additional work and responsibility, He achieved multiple further MCSE qualifications specialising in various technologies along the way, this meant that he became a subject matter expert and a point of escalation for the rest of the team on a number of different applications. Nick also understood the importance of pushing the apprentices due to his previous experience as an apprentice himself. This involved guiding and coaching the apprentices to revise well in order to take and pass their own exams to further progress and develop. Nick constantly pushes others in his team to have a “learn it all” mentality and continues to help develop them.

Nick is an exemplar employee to the organisation and has always shown an absolutely outstanding work ethic and exceeded above and beyond work expectations. Nick has topped the cases statistics within his first month at risual, closing off over 100 tickets – since then has continued to keep the bar high, setting an example for other apprentices and employees. Nick has continued his momentum and closed the most cases in any calendar month since the inception of the Managed Services division, totalling over 300 tickets which is a record that he still holds today. Nick continues to offer risual more than expected but also has a passion for watching his employees also grow and develop. Nick has an appetite for learning and his commitment towards the organisation is exceptional.

About the author