System administration is mostly a matter of balancing available
resources against the people and programs that use those resources.
Therefore, your career as a system administrator will be a short and
stress-filled one unless you fully understand the resources you have at
your disposal.
Some of the resources are ones that seem pretty obvious:
System resources, such as available processing power, memory,
and disk space
Network bandwidth
Available money in the IT budget
But some may not be so obvious:
The services of operations personnel, other system
administrators, or even an administrative assistant
Time (often of critical importance when the time involves things
such as the amount of time during which system backups may take
place)
Knowledge (whether it is stored in books, system documentation,
or the brain of a person that has worked at the company for the past
twenty years)
It is important to note is that it is highly valuable to take a
complete inventory of those resources available to you and to
keep it current — a lack of "situational
awareness" when it comes to available resources can often be worse than
no awareness at all.
