A typical situation is when I am asked, “Are you a system administrator, network administrator, network engineer, project manager, or technician?” I do not have a clear answer. I am everything together, without deep knowledge at a moment in time. I am a general IT specialist; the main thing is that I understand the essence and, if necessary, will deal with any issue.
I can migrate or change the AD schema, fix MS Exchange 2007 with all its patches and a 2TB database, or configure corporate hardware using proprietary protocols; it just takes some time. I don’t see any problems with making a professional presentation on any topic in a week. To call myself an IT project manager, I must study a lot. Nevertheless, I have project management experience, and in my practice, there have been cases when I proposed solutions that were significantly better than those offered by experienced IT project managers.
So, reading on my business card, “IT Generalist,” I mean all my experience, knowledge, and skills, which I have written below.
! I want to warn my reader that I am in the process of learning English, and with this text, I will try to describe significant events in my career, my experience, and several stories that will help you get to know me better.
I am Radik Mahmudov, and I am a IT generalist . Let’s get acquainted.
I was born, lived, and worked in a provincial town in the country’s center, which has the largest territory. While still a schoolboy, I was fond of various appliances and electronics, bought faulty ones, repaired them, and sold them. I repaired game consoles. Later in my life, computers began to appear. My first computer, which I built with my hands, was equipped with components that I bought with my own money, including a monitor. At 17, I sold my computer and bought my first car. I will get my first driver’s license in a few months. I went to college, but the severe economic crisis in the country forced me to leave it and go to work.
Without education, I was accepted as an electrician with the lowest first grade. Most of the time, I worked on the construction sites of apartment buildings, and for a couple of months, I worked on overhauling one of the local refineries. In a year and a half, I passed the qualification exams and received the 4th grade, and I also completed courses for working with a power cable and a unique tool. Due to the ongoing economic crisis, the company stopped its work, and I left for one of the commercial companies that sold gas equipment. In parallel, I was engaged in computer and office equipment repairs.
In 2000, I was invited to work in a store selling computers and office equipment, which worked at the information and computing center of the Ministry of Agriculture of the Republic of Bashkortostan. In addition to assembling and maintaining computers, I had to keep the ministry’s computers. I was actively engaged in self-development. For example, to raise my level, I completed courses on repairing HP and Canon printers, scanners, and copiers at my own expense and then successfully received certification for Microsoft server products.
After some time, I suggested that the director open a service center to repair computers and office equipment, and he agreed. That’s how I became the head of the service center. After working for a couple more years, I ended my employment relationship. The director was as focused as possible on equipment sales, while I insisted on developing services for the business.
One day, after I left the company, I met with the head of the D-Link branch. I wanted to know if they had any vacancies. There was a vacancy, and we talked for a long time, but after learning that I did not have a higher education, they refused me. I worked temporarily as a system administrator at one of the largest perfume distributors, where I maintained a database, computers, a video surveillance system, and cash registers. Six months later, I got a call and was offered a job in the D-Link office under a 3-month contract. Two weeks later, I was offered a permanent job. I traveled around the cities and made presentations on the entire product line, which I did myself. CPE devices were of interest to retailers, managed switches for Internet providers and integrators, and VoIP, IP video cameras for SMB.
During my colleague’s vacation, I had to read technical presentations for network engineers; after seeing what I was doing well, the management switched me to the Telecom sector. D-Link in our country worked very closely and diligently with the wishes of the operators. I had to collect data for the RnD department with justification for adding new functions or about problems found. For example, I had to solve a global issue because one of the leading Internet service providers started receiving massive complaints that ADSL modems and ADSL routers from D-Link stopped working. I figured it out, and a little later, I solved the problem again of a different nature; the Internet provider had problems when working with IPTV on CPE D-Link.
Sales of CPE devices snowballed, but the flow of calls to technical support also grew. The whole office answered the calls and the work became routine. I quickly got my bearings, made an infographic with a tree of solutions to the problem for each model, distributed it to colleagues, and sent a copy to the technical support of the Internet provider. Our consultation time by phone was drastically reduced, and the clients were satisfied. At that time, the company’s website had no section on hardware settings. I created my project, which I called “An unofficial technical support site for users of D-Link equipment in the Republic of Bashkortostan.” There was a lot of helpful information on the site. It described in detail the functionality of the devices; there were examples of settings for various situations. The project was so in demand that my site received second place in the competition for the best Internet service in the city. In the process, he was certified in D–Link network technologies and Cisco CCNA.
At about the same time, I completed work on a project to combine 70 branches of one of the state inspections into one network for secure access and work with the internal information system. My next significant project was constructing a campus network for one of the local universities, 12 academic buildings, and several administrative buildings.
The management slowly switched me to work with regional Internet providers. While working with regions, I realized one thing: to sell equipment, you need to teach how to work not only with network equipment but also with operating systems, servers, and various software. Of course, D-Link did not have such capabilities. I have registered my first legal entity. It was supposed to start complementing everything that D-Link did not provide.
At one of the regional conferences of D-Link and, one of the largest distributors of network solutions, I was invited to temporarily head one of the branches because the head was going on maternity leave. I agreed. My decision was announced there. While working there, he studied all passive network components, received certification, took part in several large regional projects as a consultant, and worked as a solution provider for the company.
In the days when I was still working at D-Link, in a small town of about 60 thousand inhabitants, I met the owner of a cable television. I inspired him to provide Internet access services in parallel, drew him a project, made a work plan, and in the process, trained technical staff to work with equipment and servers and introduced engineers from other Internet providers. The network was built on an upgraded fiber-optic infrastructure, and at the time of the business’s owner’s sale, there were almost 4K+ subscribers. To find out the nuances of construction, I had to work for free with one of the crews of one of the local service providers in my city for a couple of weeks during my vacation. I had to climb wells, attics, and basements, but it was worth it. In turn, I shared my experience.
After 1.5 years, my contract ended, and I completely switched to work in my company; I bought a room and began to make repairs there. I did the repairs with my hands, have no problems in the construction sector, am fluent in almost any tool, and learning to work with a new one does not take much time. I visualize processes and desired results well, allowing me to understand how to cope with any job and extraordinary tasks.
On the recommendation of my former colleagues, I did a project for one of the largest urban hospitals in the city. The hospital had several buildings with a height of 10 and 13 floors and several administrative buildings. After a couple of months, the vertical and horizontal highways became optical, all network equipment became manageable, the smooth transition from analog telephony to VoIP technology was launched, and monitoring and the Help Desk system were introduced. Since I did not have much work then, I did all the work on welding optical fiber, setting up equipment, and taking over the servers. The technical staff of the hospital itself carried out the installation work.
One of my latest completed projects is constructing and launching a “Safe City” system segment on the city embankment. This is a video surveillance system consisting of about 250 IP video cameras with image output to a video wall and traffic transfer to data storage servers
I have got a partner and am a good programmer. We started working together, and software development for medical clinics was added to the product portfolio. Since our clients were small and medium-sized businesses, we tried to work on a turnkey model for most projects.
The life cycle of almost all projects began with a meeting with the client. Omitting some formal details, the first meeting was usually with a representative of a potential client. During this meeting, I conducted a technical audit. I examined all the components of the IT infrastructure: cabinets, cable structure, power supply and air conditioning structure, servers, network equipment, software used, circuits, and logs with records. I was taking notes. After that, I met with the client himself. After the meeting, I had a list of problems that interfere with work and a list of wishes that, according to the client, should have helped his business. These data had to be comprehended, processed, discussed, and presented in a report.
! At this moment, I faced difficulties; intuitive knowledge and life experience became lacking. I went to university. The experimental direction “Business Informatics” is the Faculty of Computer Science and Robotics at the Aviation Technical University. This discipline did not provide deep technical knowledge; its task is to teach the student to make an analysis, set priorities, give an assessment, and look for ways to achieve the goal. This is how I got acquainted with composition, decomposition, business process modeling, factor analysis, and the like. The tools were IDEF0/3, BPMN, and UML. The disciplines of Philosophy and Sociology have been rethought and appreciated.
The first and foremost artifact is a report on the technical condition after the audit. The report could include possible ways to solve problems and achieve the goals previously announced by the client. The volume of the report largely depended on who it was written for; if for technical specialists, then there were more technical details; if for financiers, then there was more of some economic justification and calculations—for example, the calculation of the project budget or the calculation of the TCO. There could also be an initial scheme and a proposed IT infrastructure or business process scheme.
Sometimes, to reduce the project’s cost, the client’s employees could be involved by agreement with the client, who could take over some of the work. For example, they are often electricians, system administrators, and not only. For example, the client has his excavator, which will dig a trench, and the workers, under my supervision and guidance, will lay the cable in the trench. The electrician will arrange a proper power supply to the server room. How do I combine the resources at my disposal and the client’s disposal so that you can evaluate financial and time investments and then control and manage the workforce and budget and be on schedule? In such cases, the artifact was a working document in MS Project. In it, I displayed all the processes, indicating their sequence, budget, which labor resources should be used there, the delivery time of equipment, and everything else. I set control points in the project that allowed me to assess how the work on the project was going, whether we were on time or behind schedule. The work processes themselves proceeded sequentially or sequentially in parallel. The processes involved in software development were iterative. The accumulated experience gave me an understanding of who, how, and at what speed can work. This allowed me to schedule the work as accurately as possible and calculate the timing of the project and its budget.
Logically, a vital artifact (CMDB) appears, which displays all the elements of the IT infrastructure, has their descriptions, specifies dependencies, areas of responsibility with contacts of those responsible, hardware configurations, essential parameters, and various policies. Additional artifacts included hardware and software inventory data, a separate FAQ section, and specific automation scripts.
The life cycle of projects has always had two outcomes: the client himself continued to work with the results obtained, or they were transferred to us. For example, the client outsourced the IT structure to us, and we used the artifacts we received and kept them up to date.
All clients were connected to the office network by hardware firewalls via IPsec VPN with configured OSPF and the necessary traffic filtering rules. PXE network boot services, a support portal, telephony, network storage, a Microsoft product update server, antivirus databases, and a monitoring service were available for everyone.
I communicated with manufacturers, distributors, and dealers on my and the client’s behalf when necessary. I was invited as an expert, and sometimes, I was asked to take part in an interview with candidates.
I am not a programmer, but I have often been involved in various issues of program development, such as the development of process models. For example, I was involved in transitioning the program being developed to a microservice architecture. Scripts sometimes have to be written, and there is no way without them.
The development of software for medical clinics has led to the fact that medical and dental clinics have become the main clients. I actively dealt with specific storage systems and databases, various types of 3D scanners, tomography, cash register equipment, medical software, and hardware licensing.
My engineering hobby helps me a lot in my work.
Installing and configuring remote control of various drives for water supply, electricity, roller shutters, motion sensors, openings, temperature control, and air composition do not cause problems. For example, I selected, installed, and configured fire alarm systems in an apartment, office, and for some clients.
I have one unfinished engineering project. While carrying out major repairs of the apartment building where I lived with my family, the cable infrastructure for the video surveillance system and several controllers for the subsequent automation of the elements of the engineering infrastructure of the house were laid. Do not be surprised; my office was still in this house, and I handled the affairs of our entire apartment building on a gratuitous basis. Many years ago, residents unanimously elected me chairman of the meeting of apartment building owners. An outstanding experience for me with good results was preparing and carrying out two major repairs to the entire house in one year. A new power supply system for the house was built entirely, all windows and doors were replaced, and the house’s facade was insulated, plastered, and painted. I monitored the work’s progress and documented the work’s results. The plans were big, but what happened to me and my family forced me to change my life plans.
In August 2022, our geographical location finally changed. From 54°44′ north latitude, we descended to 33°41’03”, and from 55°58′ east longitude, we shifted to the left to 117°47’33” west longitude, and now it is that time, the time to do new things.