A Visit to North Point

Thursday, I had the privilege of visiting with Sean Strickland and Ryan Clevenger of North Point.  Some of my team had an earlier opportunity for a North Point visit and came back with some interesting ideas.  I'd expected this to be a great visit, but I was quite blown away.  Sean and Ryan were incredibly generous with their time and gave me a lot to look at and think about.

Contrary to popular opinion, North Point is NOT an all-Mac shop!  Close, but not quite.  My first big surprise was noticing a number of Dell servers sitting in the Rack.

A few highlights of the visit (there were so many great things this could turn into weeks worth of material, but it won't)

• The three campuses of North Point Ministries are connected via Metro Fiber.  10Mbit, burstable.  That connection also links them to the Suwanee Data Center which hosts their web servers and gives high-bandwidth connection to the outside world for those servers.
• Each Campus also has a T1/Pri circuit (or fractional) for data or voice, so they have various redundancies in case of loss of the fiber connection.  They can even route voice traffic from one of the remote campuses, through the fiber, and out the central campus T1.  Nice!
• North Point focuses on consistency by ordering many similar machines at once (25 or so), building them all to the same standard, and deploying them regularly.  They have one person focused specifically on machine builds/deployments and basically they deploy 3 machines per week.  That works out to a 3-year rotation for each staff member (and also includes staff turnover)
• Despite the Mac-centric environment, NP is moving toward Active Directory as the core directory services for better enterprise capabilities.  OK is "compatible," but that doesn't always equate as well as it should.
• About 1100 helpdesk tickets per month.  Know that there is some undocumented support, but trying to drive that toward zero.
• Only does 1 year warranty.  Sean has worked the numbers and can better afford to replace a few machines than to pay the extra warranty.
• North Point purposefully STOPPED doing training!  New staff are given an expectation of technical skills needed, referred to a staff specific web site, and have descriptions of skills needed after the first week, additional skills needed after the second week, etc.  If a staff member can't meet the skill levels, the staff member and the manager have to work out a solution.  (And sometimes the solution is helping the staff member realize this isn't the right fit for him or her)
• North Point focuses on "guidelines and practices," NOT policies.  Almost zero policies exist.  Special needs and exceptions are handled as needed, with the clear statement that nothing done for one person sets precedent for anyone else
• Andy Stanley does a staff training once per month for all staff.  At a recent training, he talked about expectations and how the results you get are due to the systems you have in place.
• North Point has some of the neatest wiring I've seen, and they don't even use NeatPatch!  (wish I'd taken a picture!)
• There are an assortment of non-networked printers around the campus for guests/vendors.  The USB cable has a flash drive connected that has all the drivers needed for that printer

Comments

[Jason]

"Contrary to popular opinion, North Point is NOT an all-Mac shop! Close, but not quite. My first big surprise was noticing a number of Dell servers sitting in the Rack."

- Nevermind brand-new Mac Pro sitting in foreground of this picture! :)