Voip contractor

[anything I don't mind]

I have a question regarding what you think of the expectation of work. I work at (company b) a company that has outsourced their IT to the company that i work for. The company I work for has sourced an internal employee to complete a voip phone system upgrade. I am responsible for the third line or systems admin at the company where the voip is being upgraded.

The question is about the way he implemented the project, he setup the new phone system in a test environment with a test switch. Without even looking at the existing switch configuration. He basically said it works in a test environment the rest is on me to fix and implement. All while supplying no information in text form about what he was implementing in what ip ranges. Then he arrives on site before me at 8am because he doesn't want to waste the day and makes the swap over to his server before i arrive. Then he wants to reboot the switches without letting us know that would be a requirement, claiming he did not know that the power over ethernet phones would not restart without a switch restart.

Compared to the switch config, he set it up with the wrong subnet, /24 instead of /16 and he set the incorrect gateway 254 instead of 253. I had to reconfigure the switches as it was already too late for him to change his configuration.

What would you do if you had to deal with that situation? Should I moan to my boss about it, the company b i work at probably paid a lot for this service and i end up doing the majority of the project? I would expect a part of the project is to integrate in to the existing infrastructure not just create a test environment or what it my job all a long?

It was difficult to get information out of him and he would never clearly explain what he was implementing or give me admin access to the system.

 

[anything I don't mind]

Since it wasn't your decision in the first place; find out the scope of works agreed to by the contractor and company B.

If he has delivered exactly what he was asked to... Not a lot more you can do.

Fair point. Thanks.

Do you think that is common practice though, from your experience, of outside contractors just building a test environment and then expecting the on site team (well one person in this case) to do the rest of the work?

 

[anything I don't mind]

They are cisco 3750 i think. After making the change to his system from the old one, the phones remained on. He claimed that he didn't know that the switches would need a reboot. The alternative to rebooting the switches would be to go to every phone and unplug them each individually to restart them. He claims to not know anything about the switches or existing infrastructure. It was difficult because when i arrived i didn't even know what interfaces he had setup and trying to get it out of him was difficult and he often made no sense explaining the difference interfaces and would often get confused when i am referring to specific interfaces asking questions. All he seemed to display was arrogance and condescending the whole time. Still has not given me any admin login details and when he was showing me the admin ui for the first time. He speaks like he is talking to a child and says "now you are not to touch any of this".