Sanity check: Print Server upgrade

scottalanmiller

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.

scottalanmiller

@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.

Dashrender

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.

Dashrender

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?

scottalanmiller

@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

scottalanmiller

@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.

scottalanmiller

@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.

scottalanmiller

@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.

Dashrender

@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.

scottalanmiller

@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.

Dashrender

@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.

scottalanmiller

@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.

JaredBusch

@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.

Carnival Boy

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!

Carnival Boy

@scottalanmiller said:

Bring in @thanksajdotcom he's the go to printer guy.

Where is he? Is he still posting on ML? It looks like I'm going to do this project myself and I might live-blog my progress, but I could really do with an expert on hand to help me