Sanity check: Print Server upgrade
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
I'm guessing they have no idea how to do what you want, and they are going to charge you for their education as well as the service.
Which for really special cases they should. Internal IT always charges for that, MSPs do it far less, but it still has to come somewhere. At the end of the day, clients are the only source of revenue so all education is paid for by the clients. There is just more chance of spreading it out over lots of clients rather than all being paid for by one.
So are you saying this is a case where he should be paying them for 3-4 days so they learn how to do this?
If it were my company (the MSP) I'd make my guys do this in our own lab so they understand the process, then go and bill the client the more normal time for a service like this. MSPs are paid $150+/hr because they already know how to do these things, they already spent the money on training and that cost is being spread out over many clients through the higher than hourly cost of the tech, but lower than all of the time learning said skill for the tech.
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I don't expect consultants to know everything, and I always factor in a element of learning stuff whilst they're working for me. But you've got to get the balance right. Say 80/20 in my favour - so 80% of the time they're doing stuff they know, 20% they're figuring things out as they go along.
Or to put it another way, if they spent 80% of their time on my site browsing Google, I wouldn't be very impressed!
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@Carnival-Boy said:
I don't expect consultants to know everything, and I always factor in a element of learning stuff whilst they're working for me. But you've got to get the balance right. Say 80/20 in my favour - so 80% of the time they're doing stuff they know, 20% they're figuring things out as they go along.
Or to put it another way, if they spent 80% of their time on my site browsing Google, I wouldn't be very impressed!
I can agree with that. There's also the difference between having no clue, and looking up something on Google to make sure you have the syntax correct, etc.
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@Dashrender said:
So are you saying this is a case where he should be paying them for 3-4 days so they learn how to do this?
the other option is that OTHER customers who might never use this have to pay. Who should pay, a one off one time customer or every customer?
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@Dashrender said:
I can agree with that. There's also the difference between having no clue, and looking up something on Google to make sure you have the syntax correct, etc.
That's true, but if you expect anyone in IT to have all the basics all the time, you are going to have a bad time. That's impossible. Part of every IT job is learning as you go. I learn something new at every engagement. Every environment and need is so unique that there is so little "common" knowledge that you have to learn new stuff every time.
Consultants are just IT pros like everyone else. Better resources, more active with more variety, etc. but those issues that plague internal IT plague MSPs too and cannot be avoided.
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@Dashrender said:
MSPs are paid $150+/hr because they already know how to do these things,
No, that's not why and that mentality is what causes problems. At $150/hr you are getting a normal, midlevel person at a "per hour" rate. That's how much it costs to deliver normal consulting, not for a specialist. Remember, non-IT bench work like GeekSquad is over $100/hr. That's how much it costs to have a minimum wage earner (by the hour) through a firm rather than paying someone an annual salary.
You are NOT paying for 80% of their time to be spent learning stuff somewhere else. Some, yes, like any professional. But the idea that MSPs do 80% of their time without billing and that's why you pay a little more for them by the hour is completely wrong. If that were the case, even midlevel people would be $1,000 an hour.
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@Dashrender said:
If it were my company (the MSP) I'd make my guys do this in our own lab so they understand the process, then go and bill the client the more normal time for a service like this.
I know of only one MSP anywhere that has a full lab. As great of an idea as that is, it's not normal. Now sure, the big ones probably do, but often limited to the equipment that they resell. NTG has a lab and we've never encountered any MSP or SMB that had one. They exist, but they are rare. Our lab is big enough to run a company of over 1,000 people in production. No SMB's environment is close to the size of our lab and our lab is truly a lab, no production workloads. (And we added a big server to it this week too!)
But this is a rarity, not the base case. Don't assume that your MSP can possibly afford to do this. If you were running your own MSP and charging only $150/hr you would quickly realize that you can't afford to pay salaried IT staff to do lab work on your dime while trying to maintain a cut-rate billing rate to clients for people working only 20% of the time - especially when the education that they get is for ONE client, not lots of them.
This varies by skill. If the skill is common and you expect people to do how to do that task, sure, you do it on lab time and you spread out the cost, but you aren't billing for spreading cost at $150/hr, that's bare bones trying to keep the lights on billing. But when you are doing something niche and there is no other customer to spread the cost to, you can't do that.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
I don't expect consultants to know everything, and I always factor in a element of learning stuff whilst they're working for me. But you've got to get the balance right. Say 80/20 in my favour - so 80% of the time they're doing stuff they know, 20% they're figuring things out as they go along.
That's a good way to look at it. Your environment is always going to have some element or two that are new and unique whether it is a new technology or something used in a different way than what people have seen before. They might run into an undocumented situation, be the first to deal with a new update or be working with something old that was fixed and they've never seen this older issue or any number of things. IT is not like fixing cars, it's just always new and challenging.
Consultants see a lot of stuff and are very busy so bring a ton of perspective and value to the table, but they aren't magic and have the same learning needs as everyone else and only so much time in the day and only so much money to pay for training.
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I know you're pulling this 80% number based on my 4 days of the week spent training. But this isn't reality. If it is reality that your staff has to spend 80%, heck more than 30% of the year learning (and that is probably to high) than you have the wrong staff, or at minimum a junior staff who is probably making a lot less.
This particular example is pretty absurd, and it's clear from their expectation that it will take 3-4 days to accomplish this that the people quoting it clearly have no idea what's involved and are just pulling a number out of the air, or they have been suggested this by the ones planning to do the work, and equally I feel they pulled a number out of the air. Now, I'll agree that it's difficult to estimate how much time it will take to learn something you've never done before. So you shoot for a high number, I'm just not sure where you draw the line.
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Again, you're right, NTG is a rare case that has a real lab. But if you calling yourself a MSP, you should have at least some resources so you can keep learning new things and testing simple processes like this outside of your customers environment.
Going back to my example above... do you think the company I worked for before should have demanded that the customer pay the 40 hours to install the printer because the tech was learning how to do it?
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@Dashrender said:
I know you're pulling this 80% number based on my 4 days of the week spent training.
CB's 80/20 rule
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@Dashrender said:
But this isn't reality. If it is reality that your staff has to spend 80%, heck more than 30% of the year learning (and that is probably to high) than you have the wrong staff, or at minimum a junior staff who is probably making a lot less.
It is when you are talking about niche cases. When you are talking mainstream IT needs that are broadly repeated over and over again at the same client and between clients you get really efficient training. BUt when you are talking one offs you easily have "learning" far in excess of "doing."
Because that's primarily what I do, I have tons of my time in learning and far less in doing. But the helpdesk is more like 95/5. All depends on if you are tackling the niche stuff over and over or not.
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@Dashrender said:
This particular example is pretty absurd, and it's clear from their expectation that it will take 3-4 days to accomplish this that the people quoting it clearly have no idea what's involved and are just pulling a number out of the air, or they have been suggested this by the ones planning to do the work, and equally I feel they pulled a number out of the air. Now, I'll agree that it's difficult to estimate how much time it will take to learn something you've never done before.
This case might easily be absurd. Just as a rule, assume if you are don't the most stock thing ever that there is some amount of learning or surprises to factor in.
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@Dashrender said:
Again, you're right, NTG is a rare case that has a real lab. But if you calling yourself a MSP, you should have at least some resources so you can keep learning new things and testing simple processes like this outside of your customers environment.
Some, sure. And I assume nearly all do. But even predicting what things clients will need is often very hard. If you are a traditional MSP with a pre-defined service offering this gets "easy." If you are not, it is nearly impossible.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
Again, you're right, NTG is a rare case that has a real lab. But if you calling yourself a MSP, you should have at least some resources so you can keep learning new things and testing simple processes like this outside of your customers environment.
Some, sure. And I assume nearly all do. But even predicting what things clients will need is often very hard. If you are a traditional MSP with a pre-defined service offering this gets "easy." If you are not, it is nearly impossible.
Sure, and NTG is trying to no live in a pre-defined service offering.
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@Dashrender said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
Again, you're right, NTG is a rare case that has a real lab. But if you calling yourself a MSP, you should have at least some resources so you can keep learning new things and testing simple processes like this outside of your customers environment.
Some, sure. And I assume nearly all do. But even predicting what things clients will need is often very hard. If you are a traditional MSP with a pre-defined service offering this gets "easy." If you are not, it is nearly impossible.
Sure, and NTG is trying to no live in a pre-defined service offering.
Not entirely, we have some MSP offerings, like hosted PBX for example. But our core focus is as an IT department, so just like internal IT, very custom to the customer and not making customers conform to us in order to work.
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@scottalanmiller said:
Not entirely, we have some MSP offerings, like hosted PBX for example. But our core focus is as an IT department, so just like internal IT, very custom to the customer and not making customers conform to us in order to work.
And this would explain the direction you tend to look. Customers of yours understand your need to learn at their expense the solutions they choose to deploy. I would say that until you have a relationship with a customer this would not be the norm.
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@Dashrender said:
@scottalanmiller said:
Not entirely, we have some MSP offerings, like hosted PBX for example. But our core focus is as an IT department, so just like internal IT, very custom to the customer and not making customers conform to us in order to work.
And this would explain the direction you tend to look. Customers of yours understand your need to learn at their expense the solutions they choose to deploy. I would say that until you have a relationship with a customer this would not be the norm.
It makes initial conversations harder because we are more like a fancy restaurant than a McDonald's. They rarely can just pick a combo meal or a Prix Fixe but need to look at the menu and figure out the appetizer, entree, salad and dessert that they want.
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@scottalanmiller said:
It makes initial conversations harder because we are more like a fancy restaurant than a McDonald's. They rarely can just pick a combo meal or a Prix Fixe but need to look at the menu and figure out the appetizer, entree, salad and dessert that they want.
We just had this same internal discussion. We are working on changing our marketing and this was the largest part of our discussion. How to market a service that is not commodity. I did not think about the fast food comparison. Going to email some new thoughts on that shortly.
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I have some sympathy with my vendor, and I guess you're in the same boat. Although they've done a lot of work for me in the past, they don't own my environment in the way that they own the environment of most of their managed clients. For most of their clients, they'd have provided and installed all the printers. In my case, they're walking into an environment that they are fairly unfamiliar with. That creates risks on their part.
Having said, I generally pay on a time and materials basis, so the risk is mostly mine, not theirs. But I suspect they have made massive provisions for "unexpected snags" on quoting for this project.
It makes outsourcing a problem for me. It is easy to go the whole managed service route, and doing that eliminates many of the risks for the vendor and the client - they provide the environment and the hardware so they don't have any surprises on site.
It is easy to do everything in-house, for the same reason, I provide the environment so don't have any surprises. But finding a middle ground, where I'm working in collaboration with the vendor - that is tricky and something I clearly haven't succeeded in based on a 4 day quote for a stupid effing print server upgrade!
