Welcome to the third and final installment of our three-part series demonstrating the types of services you should expect from a quality outsourced IT vendor.
Part I outlined the support you should expect from a help desk and service team, and Part II showed how your IT vendor should advise on business strategy.
Now, we’re featuring the third element of service provided by an outsourced IT vendor, project management and implementation.
Projects are pre-planned, scheduled activities, like new device installation, software migration, cabling, etc. This role might be filled by the same team that handles your day-to-day support. However, when you’re evaluating an IT partner, it is important for you to understand how they maintain the capacity to respond to daily requests while meeting their pre-scheduled project commitments.
Innovative, Inc. manages this by separating the Support and Project teams into two groups. There is some flexibility for team members to help with both Service Team and Project Team activities during peak times or vacation coverage, but for the most part each team sticks to their role. This allows us to meet project deadlines while keeping the Support Team available to meet our Service Level Agreement (SLA) commitments for day-to-day response times.
Just like some IT vendors may specialize in only day-to-day help desk support, others offer only project work. However, at Innovative, we found that projects that resulted in the greatest success for the client were projects scoped through strategy discussions.
In our service model, the Strategy Team identifies and prioritizes projects with the business and the Project Team implements that plan.
For example, in Part II we mentioned a client using Windows 7 and an accounting software not compatible with Windows 10. The Strategy Team identified that the client needs to upgrade to Windows 10 before the January 14, 2020, Windows 7 end of life, and documented that their accounting software is not Windows 10 compatible. The week of June 23, Emmy discussed options with the client and the Project Team will implement the solution by installing new equipment, migrating the software, and the destroying old equipment.
This week the team completed the following activities:
The projects above were identified through the conversations between the client and the Strategy Team. Then they were prioritized as necessary to either maintain business operations or address changes in the business.
In our experience, this is the ONLY way to identify projects that are not only a good idea from a technology standpoint, but that also makes good business sense.
Hopefully, these examples of what to expect from a business IT vendor will help you evaluate the benefits of a relationship with an IT partner. While not every vendor will follow the same service model as the Innovative, Inc. examples, it’s important for you to understand any given vendor’s approach to those service components.
In summary, the key things to understand about any IT vendor you’re evaluating are:
What is the Service Level Agreement (SLA)?