The small IT problems your business has learnt to live with

Picture a collapsed building after an earthquake. Rescue teams need to get in fast, but the gaps in the rubble are too small and too unstable for a person to squeeze through. So who do you send in instead?

Researchers in Australia have an answer: cockroaches. Real ones, wearing tiny electronic backpacks.

The insects carry lightweight electronics and can be steered through gaps that people, and most robots, can’t reach. The idea is that they could find survivors trapped under rubble and even deliver a small dose of medicine to them until rescuers arrive. It’s still early-stage research, but the thinking is clear.

It’s a strange picture, but it’s brilliant thinking. The best tool for a job isn’t always the biggest or most powerful one. Sometimes it’s the one that fits into the gap nothing else can.

Business IT works the same way. Most of the businesses we speak to have already invested in the big stuff: Microsoft 365, decent laptops, reliable broadband. But ask their teams what actually frustrates them about IT and you rarely hear about any of that. You hear about the gaps. The fiddly, awkward jobs that everyone has learnt to work around.

Ten small IT problems we see all the time

None of these will bring a business to a halt on its own. That’s exactly why they get ignored. See how many sound familiar.

1. The printer only one person can fix. When they’re on holiday, everyone else is stuck.
2. Passwords on sticky notes, in a notebook or in a shared spreadsheet. Convenient until someone leaves, or a laptop goes missing.
3. New starters waiting days for a working laptop and accounts. Their first impression of your business is sitting around with nothing to do.
4. Leavers who still have access weeks later. Their email, their files and sometimes their admin rights, all still live.
5. Files saved in three different places. The desktop, an email attachment and the shared drive, with nobody sure which copy is the latest.
6. Monday morning laptops that take ten minutes to start. Updates pile up all week and install at the worst possible moment.
7. Wi-Fi that drops out in the same corner of the office. Everyone knows not to take a Teams call from that desk.
8. Microsoft 365 licences still being paid for people who left months ago. A small monthly cost that quietly adds up.
9. The same details typed into two or three systems. Customer information keyed into the CRM, the accounts package and a spreadsheet, by hand, every time.
10. Backups that “should” be running. Nobody has actually checked whether a file can be restored.

And behind most of these sits one more: the member of staff who “knows a bit about computers” and has become the unofficial IT department, on top of the job they were actually hired to do.

Why “we’ve always just dealt with it” is expensive

Each of these problems only costs a few minutes at a time. That’s what makes them easy to live with, and easy to underestimate.

Take a business with 10 staff, each losing just 10 minutes a day to IT workarounds. That’s 100 minutes a day, or more than 8 hours a week. In other words, you’re paying for a full working day every week that produces nothing. Over a working year, it’s close to 400 hours.

The time isn’t the only cost:

• Security risk. Shared passwords and leavers who keep their access are two of the most common ways businesses get caught out. They’re also exactly the kind of thing Cyber Essentials checks for.
• Frustration. Good people get fed up with tools that fight them every day, and it shows.
• The hidden IT department. Every hour your unofficial IT person spends fixing the printer is an hour they’re not doing the job you hired them for.

Fixing them rarely needs anything big

The good news is that most of these problems don’t need a big project or a new system. Like the cockroach, the answer is usually a small tool that fits the gap.

The problem	The usual fix
Passwords on sticky notes or in spreadsheets	A business password manager, plus multi-factor authentication on Microsoft 365
Slow starts for new staff, lingering access for leavers	A simple joiners and leavers checklist, with Microsoft 365 accounts and laptops set up the same way every time
Files in three places	One clear folder structure in SharePoint and OneDrive, so there’s only ever one copy
Monday morning updates	Updates scheduled to install out of hours
Wi-Fi dead spots	A properly placed access point, not a plug-in booster
Licences for people who have left	A quick Microsoft 365 licence review, then a regular check
The same data typed in twice	Linking systems together, often with tools you already pay for in Microsoft 365
Backups nobody has checked	A test restore, on a schedule, so you know it works before you need it (see our backup solutions)

None of these are glamorous. But together they give your team back time every single day, and they close some of the most common security gaps along the way.

How to find the gaps in your own business

You don’t need an IT expert to find these problems. Your team already knows where they are; they’ve just stopped mentioning them.

Try this for one week:

1. Ask everyone one question: “What did IT stop you doing, or slow you down with, today?”
2. Write every answer down, however small it sounds.
3. At the end of the week, sort the list into three groups: annoyances, time-wasters and security risks.
4. Deal with the security risks first, then the biggest time-wasters.

Most businesses are surprised by how long the list gets, and by how many items share the same root cause.

Where we come in

We’re an IT support company based in Tewkesbury, working with businesses across Gloucestershire, Worcestershire and beyond. A lot of our work is exactly this: finding the fiddly corners that bigger systems don’t reach, and quietly fixing them so your team can get on with their jobs.

If you’d like a second pair of eyes on yours, book a free 20-minute chat. No hard sell, just an honest conversation about what’s slowing you down and what’s worth fixing first.