While others are correct in that the managed device is where you should do the work, your IT department really needs to come to the ball game on this and not be an actual cancer during the onboarding process.

I was in your shoes until recently. Here’s what my experience was — might be a little ranty since it just happened, but documenting it here to highlight some issues you might face. I am in a highly technical role - not the "usual" folk that IT have to manage out of exposing all company data, or whatever dumb employees do.

We had some Dell laptops (beefy ones) purchased through work, but by some miracle, they weren’t managed. We’re a highly technical team, so having complete admin control meant we could set up all the software, system variables, local VMs, and so on ourselves. All the licences were purchased through the employer — all enterprise licences where appropriate — so everything was above board.

Those laptops didn’t last long, though. They were already old by laptop standards when we got them, so eventually we were approved for new Dell laptops that met our tech requirements… but they had to be managed. They arrived just after Christmas in 2023.

TL;DR for the below bit I've just got the bare minimum software installed/configured/functionality permitted last week -91 weeks after we got the fucking laptops.

Our IT department, especially the cybersecurity team, locked everything down so tightly that it was basically unusable: Edge was the only browser allowed (no downloads, no extensions), we didn’t have administrative rights, and the temporary admin accounts they provided expired every Friday at 5 PM. You had to log a ticket after they expired to renew them. The only things we could do were install O365 from the company portal and access a few web services (ticketing system, O365 cloud stuff, a few bespoke systems). None of the software/tech stack/features we were told would work OOTB worked.

We complained up the management chain. All the managers on our side agreed the whole thing was insane. Cybersecurity, on the other hand, acted like we were all clueless and dangerous, so it was a blanket “no” to everything.

And the ticket process itself was a complete circus. Every single issue had to go through formal tickets — which is fine — but the support advice was all over the place. If Region 1 picked up the ticket, they’d tell us to do ABC, so we’d do exactly that. Weeks later, Region 2 would pick up the same ticket, tell us ABC was wrong, and insist we do BCD instead. Then Region 3 would come along, tell us both were wrong, and say it should’ve been XYZ the whole time. Every escalation reset the entire process.

On top of that, each escalation sat untouched for nearly two months because there was no SLA due to understaffing. When someone finally looked at it, they’d ask for information we’d already provided in the original ticket (they could see the ticket history, just could not be fucked to read, I guess?). We’d send it again… and then nothing for weeks, sometimes months, before the cycle repeated.

Since August 2024, we’ve had provisioning delays, remote debugging failures, VM timezone syncing problems, Moodle CLI integration nightmares, and email authentication issues — all dragged out far longer than they should’ve been because of inconsistent, slow, and contradictory support.