pasmundo,
Westi's response should help you out. You are correct in this forum being for professionals helping professionals, "INTELLIGENT WORK FORUMS
FOR COMPUTER PROFESSIONALS".
The PA is not hard to get for someone with your experience, and would steer you around many pitfalls, and problems. I would really not advise starting anywhere that does not include getting your PA before you get into the IPO, unless you are working on an in-house system, or have a PA tech to walk you through things at least. This forum is full of postings of nightmares from people who thought they could jump in on the IPO, and not have system outages, or even processors which could not be recovered.
The IPO does not have those pop-up windows that stop you from doing harmful things to your system you are the only real wizard for the system as the tech. For instance, it will allow you to upgrade your system to a release of firmware which is not compatible with your hardware which can disable digital ports on your processor, or even make your processor into an expensive paper weight unrecoverable.