Getting support from other departments

Hardware Asset Management
1

Good morning all,

I need pointers on how to approach other departments within the organization that could play an essential role in the lifecycle of our hardware assets. Any tips on answering the “What’s in it for me?” questions?

To specify, we are short on technicians responsible for retrieving our computer assets when an employee/contractor is terminated. The challenge is that we cannot retreive computer assets promptly due to a shortage in technicians, so we are thinking of a solution to ask the managers to mail these assets to the mailroom, and we need mailroom personnel to store these devices in secure place until a technician can pick up.

How can we convince the mailroom manager to be a part of the asset recovery process for offboarding requests?

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2

Without asking for any proprietary info, can I ask first what you have tried so far?

Are you trying to convince just one person, or is a few people in different locations?

James

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3

I suggest the following:

  1. Implement a process where the hardware asset is submitted to the local IT department by the employee on his/her last day in the organization.
  2. The Local IT department should be accountable to update the CI of the hardware asset with the correct status in the CMDB.
  3. Once the asset is retrieved by the IT department, they can give an ‘approval’ to the employee for the exit formalities. This can be done in the automated system itself if you have an employee HR portal.

This way you can eliminate the step where the Manager of the employee have to report the details to your team.

Thanks,
Abhijeet

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4

The short version is to convince them of the benefit to the organization and make the process as painless for them as possible.

You’ll want to appeal to their sense of altruism to some extent - that is, their alignment with the good of the organization. Leadership is usually a help there because they have that organizational alignment perspective. In this case, if the mailroom manager isn’t responsive, who is in charge of the mailroom manager?

In terms of making it easy, you can supply the locked cabinet (or whatever you’re using to store the devices), offer to help move it in and make room, etc.

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