The Nassau Guardian publishes daily, which means their worst IT problems always arrived at the worst time: deadline night. One IT manager supported the whole newsroom, and every failed print queue, frozen CMS session, or locked account landed on her phone, usually after 9 pm.
The situation
Nothing was on fire, which was the problem. Everything smoldered. Aging workstations threw the same errors weekly, the print pipeline failed in the same two ways every close, and password resets alone ate hours a week. The IT manager knew exactly what needed fixing and never got a clear week to fix it, because she was the helpdesk.
What we did
We took the helpdesk and monitoring load first, on our Managed IT plan, so every "my login won't work" call went to us instead of interrupting project work. Monitoring went onto every workstation and server, which turned the weekly mystery errors into a short list of root causes: two failing drives, one misconfigured print server, and a CMS plugin that leaked memory until reboot.
Then we automated the repeat offenders. Password resets became self-service. The print pipeline got health checks that restart it before the queue backs up. Nightly reboots on a schedule cleared the CMS issue while the building was empty.
Deadline nights got explicit 24/7 coverage, so a 10 pm problem reaches an engineer in minutes.
The results
Ticket volume dropped 40% in the first two months, mostly because the recurring issues stopped recurring. The IT manager still runs newsroom technology, but as the strategic role it should have been all along: she picks the projects, we keep the lights on underneath.
Her verdict: "Voltek IT transformed how we handle technology. Their proactive approach means we spend zero time worrying about our systems, and every time we call, a real engineer picks up."
If your IT person is also your helpdesk, we should talk.