Microsoft Signature Edition
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Minion-Queen said:
We have never had that be an issue. Of course I do have Engineers who can't deal with that and I don't send them onsite with a client because of that
Doesn't matter who the person is, if people are asking questions as you go the speed drops. There is no way around it. Not that it isn't valuable time, it can be very valuable, but it takes time no matter how it is done.
I read what Minion Queen said to mean that some people aren't teachers and don't want to be, so they do better work by avoiding direct customer contact.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Minion-Queen said:
Watching cause you want to learn is a good thing! We do have many IT people that ask to sit with us when we are onsite to pick our brains as it were. That is not an annoyance at all!
But it slows people down so you have to accept that the cost goes up when people are being watched. They slow down and if they are explaining things they might go less than half the normal speed.
Absolutely, but this slow down, making the project take longer is probably often easier to get approved by management than dedicated knowledge transfer time as a line item on the bill.
i.e. some management will happily pay
25 hours - do project
vs
12 hours - do project
13 hours - JOT/knowledge transferThe costs are the same, but it's amazing how many employers don't feel they should have to pay for their employees to learn.
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We very rarely add it as a line item. Just talk it out with the IT person and make sure we add in enough hours to compensate for that.
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@Minion-Queen said:
A good consultant would have things planned out before they get onsite for this type of work. A good plan and doing some work ahead of time, especially if a client has a slow connection saves everyone time and frustration. However we would still get paid to do the work. Do you get paid to do IT? Why wouldn't a Service Provider get paid to do the same thing?
I agree entirely. I think I didn't explain myself. I get frustrated seeing anybody sitting around doing nothing. Internal staff can do other work. Consultants are usually single-tasking on-site. I'm not angry with the consultant, I'm frustrated. A good, organised consultant might do a two hour download before coming to site. He won't be sitting in his office doing nothing during this time, he will be doing other work. I expect to pay for his time, but only the time he is actually working on my case. I have consultants remote onto our servers the night before to do some prep. I pay for this - of course I do - the point is they are working productively.
I seem to have offended you and I'm sorry, but I'm disappointed you think I'd have a low opinion of consultants. I hoped you'd know me better.
I get frustrated with low productivity, that's all. That applies to my own job, my team's jobs, and consultants'.
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@Minion-Queen said:
We very rarely and it as a line item. Just talk it out with the IT person and make sure we add in enough hours to compensate for that.
That's my point.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
@Minion-Queen said:
A good consultant would have things planned out before they get onsite for this type of work. A good plan and doing some work ahead of time, especially if a client has a slow connection saves everyone time and frustration. However we would still get paid to do the work. Do you get paid to do IT? Why wouldn't a Service Provider get paid to do the same thing?
I agree entirely. I think I didn't explain myself. I get frustrated seeing anybody sitting around doing nothing. Internal staff can do other work. Consultants are usually single-tasking on-site. I'm not angry with the consultant, I'm frustrated. A good, organised consultant might do a two hour download before coming to site. He won't be sitting in his office doing nothing during this time, he will be doing other work. I expect to pay for his time, but only the time he is actually working on my case. I have consultants remote onto our servers the night before to do some prep. I pay for this - of course I do - the point is they are working productively.
I seem to have offended you and I'm sorry, but I'm disappointed you think I'd have a low opinion of consultants. I hoped you'd know me better.
I get frustrated with low productivity, that's all. That applies to my own job, my team's jobs, and consultants'.
It's not always possible to know you're going to need a specific download. And while it's true that someone can download this and work on something else in the meantime (i.e. you downloading HP drivers while working on other stuff yesterday), you should still be billed for at least something for the time spent working on that download. As Scott mentioned some companies don't like to pay a nickle for time they don't see spent in person, so in those cases, those consultants have little recourse other than downloading the files when they arrive onsite.
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@Minion-Queen said:
Clients needing to SEE IT work make life difficult at best much of the time. I love that we here don't have as many of those clients any longer.
I have fired those types of clients. They are not worth our time.
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On the subject of downloads, it depends.
For existing clients, we already know their basic needs and we have things downloaded and ready.
For new clients, I try to discover basics during the initial network discovery so i will know if I need to have things downloaded ahead of time.
No matter what, though time is billed.
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Sure. The case I originally referred to was an Autodesk reseller who brought the wrong media for a big install and spent an entire day reading the newspaper whilst massive Autodesk files were downloaded over our slow connection, at $1500 a day. I wasn't mad with him, but it was bad planning by people at his firm. I didn't pay for it in the end, but that's by the by - it was a waste of everyone's time.
Like anything in life, there are both consultants and clients who try and rip each other off. I'm not one of them.
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Anyway, my point remains then: uninstalling crapware takes 15 minutes, so costs $30. A clean OS and driver download takes 2 hours, so costs $240. So there is a case for doing the former.
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People who don't plan well drive me nuts. But that is why I do the planning.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
Anyway, my point remains then: uninstalling crapware takes 15 minutes, so costs $30. A clean OS and driver download takes 2 hours, so costs $240. So there is a case for doing the former.
My point was that these numbers don't hold up. They only work if you 1) only consider the setup time and not the lifetime support cost of the machine as it adds technical debt potentially 2) don't count the time saved doing this for multiple machines or consider the cost of future rebuilds
And, of course, if you have an imaging process, which anyone of any size would be expected to have, this is all moot and it is completely covered by that anyway.
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@Dashrender said:
As Scott mentioned some companies don't like to pay a nickle for time they don't see spent in person
Well, that's unfortunate. I used to be a consultant, so maybe I'm better at seeing things from both perspectives.
Often it is more productive for consultants to work on our stuff remotely, and I always encourage this. One of our consultants lives in India, so on-site work isn't an option. Working remotely gives them so much more flexibility. Others feel they can work better on-site because they don't have any distractions. It depends on the job to a degree. The main downside of remote working is probably that you don't get to chat and pick the brains of the consultants whilst they work.
With remoting, I suppose you also have to trust the consultants to charge you a fair rate based on the amount of actual work involved. But this is no different to letting employees work from home. I work hard on building good relations with a select group of consultants. There are times when they've quoted for an 8 hour job and it has taken 12 hours and they don't charge me anything extra. So if an 8 hour job only turns out to take 4 hours I'm delighted - it means the job went particularly well. I would never expect a refund or anything. Some times I'll get an on-site consultant to finish early in order to beat the rush hour traffic and then he'll log on from home and finish off the job. It's a win-win.
But generally I find the idea of a consultant getting in a car and driving 2 hours to my office through heavy traffic just to do an installation that he could do just as well sitting in his pyjamas at home is just insane. Then when they're waiting for a 2 hour download they could be walking their dog or playing with their kids instead of sitting in my office drinking my tea. That's what pisses me off. It is just so inefficient.
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@Carnival-Boy if only more people had that attitude. Good companies do, but in the SMB space those are few and far between. We have good, long term clients that work that way, but generally only after a long time of having been on site and knowing the techs personally.
