Advances in cloud software have enabled many startup owners to run an extremely lean business model with little physical footprint. Colleagues may work and collaborate 100% remotely, with online portals serving as a de facto office. However, few businesses can function effectively without investing in mobile devices or laptops for their staff. This can present IT administrators with a challenge: how best to manage these assets?

The IT experts AccessOwl spoke to have some useful advice:

1. Plan well ahead for onboarding

Hardware asset management (HAM) initiatives can take time, especially when onboarding new employees, according to Liam Williamson, IT Manager at TrueLayer. He describes joining his current employer during a period of  rapid hiring, where hardware purchasing wasn’t able to scale to meet these requirements.

“We had the challenges of setting up those vendor relationships and figuring out the logistics of getting new equipment to people, so that it arrived at least the week before they did,” he says. “There was also a figuring out of what was the right number of laptops to have, because we were ordering custom builds, so they weren't on the shelf.”

Customized specs meant a three-week lead time for ordering new MacBooks. Ensuring the hardware was ready for new starters meant close collaboration with other parts of the business.

“All of this stuff was a challenge. I was trying to work with the hiring team to understand when they were hiring people and when they are expected to start,” Williamson says.

2. HAM could be important to the finance team

For Erik Ours, IT Manager at Wieden+Kennedy Tokyo, outside of mobile device management (MDM), the company only uses HAM for finance depreciation. Although he considered an automated tracking tool for this, because the fleet was only 100 devices, Ours decided to do it all in Google Sheets.

“I [align] myself with what the system that finance was using, and ensured that I just used a spreadsheet that I gave them access to,” he says. “I'm not going to create a system that makes sense to me, but doesn't make sense to finance.”

3. HAM is critical for security

HAM is also  foundational for effective cyber risk management, because you can’t protect what you can’t see. That’s why Kaia Health IT Manager, Lukasz Jaroszuk, made sure all his company’s devices were trackable via MDM as a priority when he joined.

“We set the priorities; we told our managers, ‘We need to secure our hardware, we need to know where our hardware is, what it is, and make sure that everything is visible in our MDM solution,” he says. “We needed to set up a minimum-security level when it comes to deploying patches. It’s about basic security first.”

4. Set up a physical HAM function

Although many startups function with virtual offices and remote workers, a physical hub is sometimes needed to manage hardware, according to Gearset IT Manager Nathan Goodfellow. He explains that in the early days of a previous job, employees were sometimes buying IT equipment not optimized for their role. His task was, therefore, to bring order to the chaos—formalizing procurement and setting up an official IT support channel in Slack for hardware issues.

“It was about getting a grasp on what we were buying, getting some good supplies in, setting up that pipeline there of good resellers and things to use,” he says.

“Then it was getting a physical equipment room, so we had stuff on hand rather than panicking when someone new joined and there wasn't enough equipment. We always want it to be a really good experience for new starters.”

5. Try and consolidate tooling

Where possible, HAM solutions that integrate closely with other management software can save the IT team significant time and effort, according to Grant Bordelon, IT Operations Specialist & System Network Administrator at Rep Data. He advocates using a workforce management platform..

“We can buy a new device and ship it out to someone with a user account already loaded. Two days beforehand, we have all these automation rules that create their Gmail account, Slack account and Monday account with single sign-on (SSO),” Bordelon explains. “I almost feel guilty, it’s so easy. It would have taken a full day or two to get done before. Now the laptop shows up at their house, they log in and they already have all their stuff.”

6. Try to standardize hardware

Jakub Łączak-Król, IT Asset Manager at XTB, says that in a previous job, he faced a couple of challenges. Not only was there no centralized documentation to link devices to their users, but the sheer variety of different devices in use was becoming unmanageable. That’s why he resolved to standardize permitted hardware onto a small number of vendors and models.

“A particular employee had a different monitor and mouse and keyboards to other people, so I thought: ‘This is quite a mess. Let's create a standard. Let's talk with team leaders and find out what their needs are and cost out equipment. I talked to them, gathered the information and created a standard,” he says.

Kaia Health’s Jaroszuk had a similar experience. He notes that while larger organizations tend to standardize on a small number of vendors, this is often not the case at startups.

“When you have a great influx of capital coming into the company, you buy equipment. But then one person has an HP laptop, there are MacBooks, there's a custom-made laptop for someone, and for IT support it's a nightmare because you have so many different systems,” he says. “We said to managers, ‘we need to sort this out.’ We needed the standardization because we needed to know what's happening and support our people as efficiently as possible.”

Felix Naepels, Head of Internal IT at Pigment, argues that “hardware is usually a real mess” at the start of a new job, and standardization is the only way to support onboarding of new employees at scale. The challenge for IT Administrators is to manage the expectations of startup employees as they do so.

“Usually in those tech startups, they want to keep the spirit that everything can be customized for each user as long as possible. But they need to understand that hypergrowth can’t happen this way,” he says. “Our job has really changed over the past 5-10 years. We didn't use to be logisticians in IT, but now that’s a huge part of our job. Suddenly we’re all UPS experts.”

The startup IT Administrator will always need to be multi-disciplined to some extent. But by prioritizing, standardizing and streamlining HAM, there will at least be one less job to worry about.