Most IT shops have a quiet rivalry between application support and infrastructure. Different priorities, different tools, different definitions of “done.” But every once in a while, two teams stop guarding their turf and solve something that neither could solve alone.
Here’s one of those stories.
The Ask
An Infrastructure team was asked to give student password-reset capabilities to specific staff at each of 120 schools. The catch: Teacher A at School B could only reset passwords for students at School B. Tight scoping, granular permissions, school-by-school.
Infrastructure pushed back. Staff movement is high in a school district. Maintaining 120 separate permission scopes manually would be a nightmare. Reasonable concern.
The Hallway Conversation
The application support team was already maintaining Azure Groups and group memberships through an automated sync from the HR system. Someone from infrastructure happened to chat with someone from app support, and the idea landed:
Why don’t we just hook these together?
The Hitch
Of course, there was a catch. Azure won’t let you add Administrative Units to an existing group. You can only assign them at group creation. The sync program was already creating groups, just without the Administrative Unit attached.
The fix: tweak the sync program to create new groups with the Password Administrator Administrative Unit enabled from the start. The fix needed higher privileges than the sync job was running under, but that got worked out too.
The result: the sync job now creates these groups, manages their membership through HR data, and grants password-reset capabilities at the right scope. No manual maintenance. No 120 separate processes to babysit.
The Real Lesson
The technical solution is interesting, but the more important point is this: the breakthrough came from a hallway conversation, not a steering committee. When the two teams stopped treating the problem as “your problem” and started treating it as “our problem,” the solution showed up quickly.
Celerity Insights shares the problems and the solutions, so more of us know what was unknown.
