Managed IT Services

[PurplePhoenix]

Look at a remote support contract and include time for someone to be at each site 1/2 a day per month or something. If you have a vpn everything can be set up off site and posted. If you do get an employee remember you have extra cost , car, fuel pension ,sick days etc.

 

[AHarvey]

Not sure the cost of 80 Macs would sit nicely with the budget for the next year, plus we run Sage200c on 35 devices which is not Mac supported. But I get what you're saying.

Thanks for the input the rest of you, seeing £34k/year for 30% of my workload does not really make sense, possibly employing a junior might however, we won't get anyone for £17K round here but for £25K inc overheads we would get close. Maybe investing in some investigation as @Quartz said might be the first step and seeing what benefits that brings.

Honestly, if you were closer I'd be offering to do the work for you. Similar to what I'm earning, love remote working and I'm bored where I am. Find someone with a passion even if they've not got a massive amount of experience, I didn't, other than troubleshooting and an interest in the work. I started writing blogs, then ended up running the £7k a month SEO/adwords campaign and took over from the old IT guy when they sacked him off. I was given 3 logins when I started, nothing else, when I left after 18 months I had procedures for everything, naming conventions, password/security, and a job list with other 4500 jobs completed on it.

Invest in a person, training and some decent helpdesk software and you'll find it so much easier.

It'll be an excellent opportunity for someone too, and if you invest in them, you'll ease your workload even more and managing a successful person will make you look even better

 

[AHarvey]

Cost of employment isn't just salary. There's employer's national insurance, pension contributions, management overhead, and so on.

Yes, which can all be taken into the cost when planning, but it'll still be cheaper in the long run vs external support by device.

Should get them to buy Macs - happier users, fewer issues...

This isn't a Mac fanboy post but was what IBM (of all people!) found from looking at the data from thousands of users.

My old boss had a mac and an iphone. Compared to the 400 other windows/android devices I managed that mac was a pain. Granted a lot was because I just didn't have the experience with them but I know his macbook had a hardware failure and had to be sent off to be repaired, nothing i could do with it.

 

[dowie]

My old boss had a mac and an iphone. Compared to the 400 other windows/android devices I managed that mac was a pain. Granted a lot was because I just didn't have the experience with them but I know his macbook had a hardware failure and had to be sent off to be repaired, nothing i could do with it.

Well that's not particularly relevant or informative - it is an anecdote about one device - seemingly your boss was unlucky - an organisation that actually looked at this a bit more formally had a rather different experience over thousands of devices.

 

[AHarvey]

Well that's not particularly relevant or informative - it is an anecdote about one device - seemingly your boss was unlucky - an organisation that actually looked at this a bit more formally had a rather different experience over thousands of devices.

Yes well I was talking from a personal perspective

However, Apple devices are rather well known to be harder to switch out hardware. There's a lot of specialist software that only runs on Windows which needs taking into consideration. Then there is the cost of investing in the first place.

Mac's may be great in certain industries, such as design companies, that doesn't mean they'll be a good fit in others.

 

[dowie]

Yup and the OP has commented on that - in particular some accounting software thus they perhaps wouldn't be suitable for him.

 

[sideways14a]

The numbers we look after here are.
Circa 320 desktops and laptops
Several dozen teaching rooms with extensive AV
Lots of voip and older digital phones
Dozen or so video conference rooms
Specialist teaching technology.
Vast amounts of Wireless APs
Mostly windows 7 and 10 with less than 5 macs ohh and about 10 or so servers.

All that on 2 and a half folk, we do the AV, pc and decent amount of lvl3 support as well - phones, networking... its all done.

Point is if you have good procedures written for everything and good backup (ie people to call when things go banana shaped) you can do a lot with not a lot of bodies. Just need to get the right folk.