Topic 4

It’s Not Easy Starting a Managed Service Offering

The Gartner article “Key Considerations When Thinking About Insourcing or Changing IT Service Providers” was an interesting read because my organization has been trying to start a new line of business in managed services. The idea is to have three different service offerings for a managed service: Bronze, Silver, Gold. The bronze service offering allows the client to have a finite number of hours per week to leverage a pool of resources for defects and enhancements. The silver service offering assigns a ServiceNow subject matter expert to the client and can be utilized for development, design, and road mapping of their platform. The gold service offering is a complete outsource of their ServiceNow help desk team. All defects and enhancements would be routed to a dedicated team in my organization.

The initiative has started a little over a year ago with a RFP with a luxury bag manufacturer. The client worked with us for many years and has a sound understanding of our services and quality of our deliverables. We were very confident that we were going to win the contract however this was not the case. They saw too much risk with being the first client for our managed service offering. From an evaluation standpoint, this makes sense especially after reading the Gartner article previously mentioned.

The article mentions the common factors that drive the decision: Cost, Control, Change, Contract, Alignment, and Frustration with service quality or vendor relationship. The common factors that was driving the need to outsource the services was the following:

Change: The client was pursuing various acquisitions and did not want to invest more money into the IT department.

Cost: Outsourcing the help desk will be much cheaper than keeping employees on staff.

Alignment: There were too many vendors and contractors work on the ServiceNow platform. Their goal was to work with one vendor for not only outsourcing the help desk department but also for project work, defect remediation, and development of enhancements.

After being notified that we lost the RFP, we reached out to our contact within the organization and asked for feedback. Much to our surprise, the quality that we were known for was not a metric in the decision process. The client was looking for a cheap alternative, that has a reliable and proven process, and is flexible to make adjustments when needed. Unfortunately, our proposal was different from this. The owner of my organization stressed that they would be the first client so we would align with them from a cost perspective in order for us to get the process correct. Our costs were much higher because our organization is entirely U.S. based. Our competitors outsource their developers to India which makes them much cheaper from a vendor perspective.

One year later, we’re still are trying to perfect the delivery of our proposal. I plan on sharing what I learned from this Gartner article so that our service delivery manager can prepare a proposal that addresses the common factors in deciding to outsource and to answer some of the questions when determining outsourcing is a viable option.

Huntly, Helen. (2013, June 25). Key Considerations When Thinking About Insourcing or Changing IT Service Providers. (ID: G00249310). Retrieved from Gartner database.

December 5, 2017 bjb5027 Leave a Comment

Technology Evaluation From a Small IT Consulting Business Perspective

One challenge my organization has without technology architecture is with the services we offer our client. We have two types of technology that we must evaluate internal technology and technology tied to the services we offer. New technology is brought into my organization based on 4 different criteria which are: client’s standard for project delivery, project delivery improvements, technology related to a new service/line of business, or an issue or threat has been identified.

The first way technology is introduced into my organization is the standards a client requires for their projects. For example, for one project we had to design a web interface for their self-service portal. We initially used photoshop to provide mockups however the client’s graphics department ironically did not use this for initial web designing. Instead, they used an application called Balsamiq. We ended up purchasing a license in order to use the application and keep the project moving along.

The second way technology is introduced into my organization is an identified opportunity to improve project delivery. Our profitability of projects is dependent upon how quickly we can complete projects without decreasing the amount we charge for a deliverable. In order to do this, we have to create reusable/templated deliverables and/or use technologies to improve our processes. This type of technology is typically not sought after from a research perspective. Usually other efforts identify a use case or an online article one of my employees have read and briefly propose the use case. The rule of thumb in my organization when it comes to using technology for project work is if you think it’s a good idea then pilot it in your next project and see if it in improves our delivery process. Balsamiq was mentioned previously as a technology used with a client project due to their application standards. We saw this application as an opportunity to improve how we deliver our self-service portal deliverable. After that particular project, we began using it for other portal projects and found it as an opportunity to increase customer satisfaction. Now it has become a standard in my organization.

The third way technology is introduced into my organization is related to a new service or line of business. The leadership steering committee typically decides on a new service offering or a line of business that we want to pursue. In this scenario, it is up to the delivery team to identify the technologies needed to support the service or line of business. There’s also another scenario where lines of businesses and new services are driven vertically from employees. In my opinion, I find this to be the biggest opportunity to drive innovation and to grow the company however, there is a major roadblock. Ironically, our sales team is not very technically knowledgeable. ServiceNow implementations are our main line of business and is very easy to talk about to a non-technical individual. When a new idea is driven vertically, the first question that is asked by our sales team, who is also run by our CEO, is “I don’t know how to sell that”. The business need and/or industry trend is typically used as the answer to the question. If the CEO and sales team doesn’t understand, then the idea is squashed and no further research is done. The delivery team finds this to be one of the most frustrating situations. Lately, I’ve been trying to assist my team members with developing business cases in order to present their ideas. One result of this is our current pursuit is to start a cyber security line of business.

The fourth way technology is introduced into my organization is the result of an issue or threat internally or externally to my organization. For example, as an IT consulting company that works in the cloud, access to the internet is crucial to the organization. Previously, our Comcast cable internet’s downtime was increasing by the week. We had no internet backup so we were “dead in the water” sort of speak and could not work on our deliverables or host meetings with our clients. We then have to rush home to use our non-work internet which raises security concerns. As a result, we established a internet backup connection using a lower priced smaller bandwidth connection using fiber. When our main internet connection goes down, we no longer need to panic and can continue with business as usual.

Our 2018 goal is to become more standardized so our processes and reporting structures are scalable as we grow as an organization. One of the biggest areas of improvement is documentation created from projects and becoming more efficient with creating statements of work. We are currently evaluating Office 365 and understanding all of it’s capabilities. The other item I’ll be personally working on is assisting with technology proposals so that the sales team no longer becomes the gatekeeper of pursuing technologies for new services and lines of business. We need to better present the technology from a client’s business need perspective as opposed to a “next great technology” perspective.

December 1, 2017 bjb5027 Leave a Comment

Virtualization Is An Internal and External Frustration

The topic in this lesson is Technical Architecture and touches a little bit on virtualization. Virtualizatio has becoming a very hot topic internally at my organization as well as conversations with clients. Clients try to save money and resources by creating virtual workstations for employees so that they can bring their own device. They also use a similar approach to contractors and consultants to keep their network and data secure. They also do the same with servers as well. In this post I’m going to discuss a few observations and challenges as it seems like clients are letting technology drive their business.

Virtual workstations are definitely the biggest risk to our projects. When clients have a policy that consultants must use virtual computers in order to develop and share documents, it is expected that the device will be very slow and there will be many access issues. Client’s virtualization teams will typically provision workstations with the least amount of resources and application/network access. It can take up to two weeks for a virtualization team to add more resources to the image or receive justification on why my project team needs more access. As a result, we typically do a change request to the project to either extend the project or add additional hours. As you can imagine, clients do not like tapping into their budget for more money. Sometimes while negotiations are taking place, the virtualization teams increase resources they want to see proof that there are issues. In one particular case, the virtualization team increase resources while we were justifying a need for a change request then immediate reduce resources once we identified there was no more issues with the virtual workstation.

The biggest challenge internally for clients is the inability to control when virtual servers are created. It is always best practice to have a change management ticket before placing any type of device on an organization’s network for auditing and security purposes. Since provisioning a server takes less time than putting in a change take, teams try to find entering one in the first place. As a result, there’s no justification on why server and virtual licenses are increasing or and checks and balances that the individual selected the correct virtual image to grant appropriate access.

As an IT consulting company, we identified this issue as well as our software vendor we have partnered with. They have created integrations with populate virtualization software such as Citrix and VMware. The idea is that only super users can manually spin up a virtual server and anyone else has to use to put in a request for service and a change management ticket. Once approved and within the change window, the software we implement will use web services to provision a new server and validate the correct virtual image was used.

From our observation, this issue is only going to get worse and the knowledge gap with these virtualization software is going to get broader and more complicating. There is an opportunity for us to become experts to help our clients however there are other higher priorities internally.

December 1, 2017 bjb5027 Leave a Comment