-In IT, redundancy in your critical infrastructure should follow the old Army rule: Two is One. One is NONE..
-Tracking tasks, escalation tickets, and project status from e-mail threads in Outlook = the most inefficient way to track work since God gave Moses stone tablets. Get your team tools to manage your work pipeline, the best tools for each activity in your IT services portfolio, and email is not it.
-You can aim your most talented engineers at a problem, give project direction to them, but NEVER micromanage them or prod the outcome. Your risk an inconsistent or flawed result, doing so. Your job is to worry and be paranoid, but your reports needn’t deal with that. Plus, the most talented engineers (and best-managed, which is on you) need only to be given a clear outcome statement. Status meetups, sure, but give them a clear directive and then get out of their way.
-If you’re a small company and don’t have a deep bench to pull from, don’t diss your star IT players. Unless you like consultant and MSP-dependency, and a slower time-to-live on project cycles.