Devices & Deployment
A new starter should not wait a week for a laptop.
Device management is judged entirely at two moments: the day someone starts and the day someone leaves. Both are usually improvised, which is how a new hire spends their first week borrowing a machine and how a departed employee's laptop sits in a drawer with a live session on it. This is the work of making both of those routine — specified hardware, zero-touch enrollment, and a documented path out.
- Device enrolls without a technician
- Zero-touchDevice enrolls without a technician
- Warranty and end-of-life dates recorded
- TrackedWarranty and end-of-life dates recorded
- Disposal documented, per device
- CertifiedDisposal documented, per device
Sounds like
You might recognise one of these.
Every laptop is a different model with a different setup.
A new starter takes a week to be productive because their machine is not ready.
We have leavers' devices in a cupboard and no record of what is on them.
Someone's machine died and they lost work.
What this includes
The work, specifically.
Not every engagement needs all of it. This is the range we cover and what each part is actually for.
Hardware standards
A short list of specified models per role, so spares are interchangeable, support is predictable and procurement is a decision already made.
Zero-touch deployment
A device ships to the user and enrolls itself: policy, applications, encryption and access, without a technician touching it first.
Procurement and asset tracking
Buying, tagging and tracking devices, warranties and their end-of-life dates, so a refresh is planned rather than discovered.
Offboarding and disposal
Retrieval, wipe and certified disposal or redeployment, with a record of what happened to each device and its data.
Spares and rapid replacement
A stocked spares position sized to the estate, so a dead machine is an inconvenience rather than a lost week.
What you get
Deliverables, not documents.
- A standard build per role, documented and reproducible
- Zero-touch enrollment configured and proven on a real device
- An asset register with warranty and end-of-life dates
- A documented offboarding path, including data handling and disposal records
- An agreed spares holding
Shapes
How this usually runs.
Estate and standards review
1–2 weeksWhat is deployed, how old it is, what is out of warranty, and what the standard builds should be.
Standardization rollout
4–10 weeksEnrollment configured and devices brought onto the standard build as they refresh, rather than in one disruptive sweep.
Managed lifecycle
OngoingProcurement, deployment, refresh planning, offboarding and disposal as a running process.
Tooling
What we build it with.
No tool here was picked because it was new. Where we do reach for something novel, it is in one place, for a stated reason, and it is written down.
- Deployment
- Management
- Lifecycle
Questions
Devices, honestly.
No, and we would advise against it. New standards apply at refresh, so the estate converges over a normal replacement cycle instead of turning into a capital project. The exception is anything already out of support, which we would flag separately.
Both, where the work calls for it. What matters is that each platform has a defined standard build and enrollment path — the expensive situation is not having two platforms, it is having thirty machines that were each set up by hand.
It is wiped to a documented standard and you get a record per device, including the disposal or redeployment route. That record is what you will want if anyone ever asks where a former employee's laptop went.
Often paired with
Next step
Tell us what’s breaking.
Forty-five minutes, no charge, no deck. We’ll tell you what we’d do, what it would likely cost, and whether you should be building this at all.