Have you ever known the outsourcing of IT Support/Services work?

[steinooo]

A tonne of us on here must work in IT, and numerous of us must have experienced outsourcing in some form or other.

Mainly outsourcing IT Support which looks to the Execs to be a great opportunity for a cost/FTE saving

However in 15 years in IT I've only ever known user dissatisfaction, reduced levels of support and an eventual swing back to in house.

What are your experiences?

 

[Rroff]

An eventual return of atleast some capabilities in house has generally been inevitable in my experience - depending on setup this sometimes means bringing the whole lot back as having any degree of it at all requires a big chunk of the same money for some organisations.

 

[d_brennen]

I worked for a managed service provider and now work for their former customer. They can't have been that dissatisfied with me and are now saving a packet employing me directly!

At the end of the day, any third party has their bottom line to work to where as in house is more personal.

 

[steinooo]

They can't have been that dissatisfied with me

I find there are the odd gems who work for MSPs, and it's great that they approached you directly.

I'm currently sitting at a private firm watching a new MSP take the money, whilst their basic incident and change processes are not well defined, so because the processes are bad/aren't defined at all/take ages to action, the users still walk up to the staff who were TUPEd to the MSP, because they are sitting in the same office, that's what they've always done and they don't care that they're breaking the rules. Depressing!

 

[nox_uk]

nah - outsourcing is basically an extra layer of people which has an associated cost. Short term it can work, especially if the IT department is initially heavily overstaffed but long term, I can't see it - the outsourcing company usually gets too greedy at the expense of the guys on the bottom.

 

[pepp77]

As I work for a company that offers both telephony and IT installation, maintenance and support I have to say it is a great way to do it. A smaller company can get a fully trained consultant in for a day a week/month etc, for a set cost that will be a lot lower than hiring a full time staff member to do the same thing.

 

[Jonnybmac]

My last company of around 15 people the IT was outsourced to another company that took care if email spam, server backups and day to day problems with the PC. Was annoying if you needed to install some thing you needed to phone for a request, but I guess no different to most large companies going through their support page.

 

[memyselfandi]

I have known it to work but I have also seen it go badly wrong. If the relationship, requirements and procedures are well defined then it can work. In the latter case is normally due to expectations being ill defined, normally not helped by the outsourcing providers sales department, or the Customer expecting a level of detail control which prevents the outsourcing provider from implementing their standard supported solution properly. Things tend to go the worst in when the Customer expects to keep design authority when they have no grasp of anything that has changed in the last 20 years (NDAs mean I can't name names no matter how much I would like too).

 

[maj]

I work for a cloud solution and services provider and we host their desktops, servers, email and manage their backups etc. We have plenty of customers so the demand is there. Some have been customers since my employer was founded. One customer has 3 sites across the UK and they all outsource to us.

 

[covenantuk]

The trick to making outsourcing work is all in the contract negotiation - unfortunately most organisations who outsource don't realise this and then find out later that the service provided is not sufficient, or too expensive, or both.
One organisation I know outsourced support of a legacy software system, only to forget to include software upgrades/changes in the cost - it cost more than the whole contract value when they found out it needed re-wrtiing after IE6 was dropped.

 

[andicole0]

Outsourcing works by gettimg the outsorce company to hack and slash costs then 'sell' it back to the original company cheaply. I am convinced it's a tax avoidance scheme.
Andi.

 

[Caged]

To me it seems daft to try and put such a vital function in the hands of people who are not invested in the success of the wider business.

 

[andicole0]

To me it seems daft to try and put such a vital function in the hands of people who are not invested in the success of the wider business.

It is all to do with cost control, accountants like numbers that don't change, even slightly bigger ones. Accountants also don't look at the business only profit.
Andi.

 

[Deleted member 77746]

It works for some, depends on the agreements. Doesn’t work for all though.

 

[Caged]

Example came up today where a customer had an IT provider and then firewalls managed by their ISP. The contract for their IT support doesn’t have them managing the relationship with the ISP at all - so any internet/firewalling questions asked of the people who are meant to be in charge of IT get met with a “not our responsibility” answer.

You end up with simple things like a VPN tunnel config change or an ACL taking a day to complete and involving hours of conference calls. Which the end customer then receives bills from two companies for.

Just doesn’t make sense.

 

[Ev0]

It works for some, depends on the agreements. Doesn’t work for all though.

Pretty much this from my experience (I’m not in outsourcing, but work for someone who does provides it).

I’ve seen it work very well, to not really working at all

In Caged’s example above, you could argue that the customer should have made provision in the contract for dealing with the ISP/firewall management, or ensured it was covered in some way.

It’s tricky as you can’t think of every eventuality and situation to cover, imagine there will always be things that crop up out of scope, and it’s certainly a different way of working.

 

[glenimp617]

I did the opposite two years ago. The manager before me was paying £130k a year to outsource the IT of an international site in the middle east. Turns out, they were only sending some helpdesk guy out to site once in a blue moon! I asked him what the blade chassis password was, or the password for the san. He didn't know!

The systems were in a shocking state after I did a healthcheck. Dead FSMO roles, no backups since the system went in, file servers were all full, no printing system was available, no reporing of any kind telling them the health of their estate.....the list was endless.

Cancelled the contract and gave three of my engineers a 10k payrise to do it. Saved me £100k (minus a few flights, hotels, taxis etc etc), and have three very happy engineers.

It might not be a trip to the bahamas, but they enjoy it.

 

[shine]

A client migrated all their email systems into the cloud with an MSP given the project to migrate and future support. The first week the new system went live there was a company wide email outage. It took 8 days for email to work again!

Somehow the same MSP won the contract to manage the data centres, one of their first tasks - configure Direct Connect with AWS. Every 3 months they would update that the project needs another 3 months. It took them 14 months to implement. The project was considered a success by management...

 

[glenimp617]

A client migrated all their email systems into the cloud with an MSP given the project to migrate and future support. The first week the new system went live there was a company wide email outage. It took 8 days for email to work again!

Somehow the same MSP won the contract to manage the data centres, one of their first tasks - configure Direct Connect with AWS. Every 3 months they would update that the project needs another 3 months. It took them 14 months to implement. The project was considered a success by management...

Yep, management only sees the end result, not the stuff in the middle

 

[Deleted member 77746]

I’ve just had one where projects where supposed to do a task integrating PRTG into all of their devices to be monitored. 14 months down the line someone hasn’t done their job which means... I had a ticket logged yesterday I had to deal with.

I couldn’t because there was no monitoring on any of the devices. My ticket had to go up to have their whole site added into PRTG for all of their devices. That’s a big failure. Not from my behalf though.