I love Daniel Pink’s writings. I thought I would share this article from SmartCompany.com. The message about Purpose, Mastery and Autonomy I reread from time to time. The message is short, but it rings so true for me. The most powerful and valuable essence of Pink’s writing is in the second half of this short article in the section titled, The three great motivators: purpose, mastery and autonomy.
When it comes to managing IT infrastructure, following Daniel Pink’s advice can help produce better results.
You can read the full article HERE at THIS LINK.
Smoke testing is a term used to describe the testing process for servers after patches are applied. 
Estimating an average time for patching servers and PCs can be a bit tricky. It can vary from one month to the next, depending upon the number and complexity of the patches released by your software vendors. You must consider all versions of operating systems and have a complete inventory of all your application software to do this job correctly. Our experience has shown that manual patching of systems takes on average of about 1.5 hours each.
This is a basic cost calculator for you to compute your typical monthly cost for patching your servers, PCs, laptops, tablets and associated application software. It also forms the basis for you to begin calculating your Return on Investment for software patching, or for comparison with alternatives to the manual process of patching operating systems and application software—such as Patch Management as a Service, also known as Vulnerability Management as a Service.