Sanity check: Print Server upgrade
-
@Carnival-Boy said:
They're not printer vendors, they're "IT Solutions Specialists".
They've quoted 3 to 4 days.
Would you mind private messaging me who they are?
I can do much much bigger projects which would take 3-4 days. They sound very special.
-
Something seems very wrong here. Either you have left out a very big important piece of the puzzle or they are hideously over-quoting you.
-
I can't think of anything I've missed. It has been bothering me all weekend. Hence the reason I've started a thread on it!
They've already spent 4 hours on-site preparing a statement of works. I'm confused as to why that took so long.
From the outset, I thought it would take a day, at most.
-
@Carnival-Boy said:
They've already spent 4 hours on-site preparing a statement of works. I'm confused as to why that took so long.
With respect, sounds like they are taking you for a ride. Like...they should have done the entire job in 4 hours.
Have you signed anything yet? -
@Breffni-Potter said:
Have you signed anything yet?
Hell, no.
It's not a case of taking me for a ride. I've used them for years and been relatively satisfied, and they know I'm pretty experienced generally - even if I'm a crap at printers.
-
@Carnival-Boy said:
I can't think of anything I've missed. It has been bothering me all weekend. Hence the reason I've started a thread on it!
They've already spent 4 hours on-site preparing a statement of works. I'm confused as to why that took so long.
From the outset, I thought it would take a day, at most.
I worked for a consulting/MSP a while ago where an employee there had no idea what he was doing, tried installing a network printer, after 2 days (16 billable hours), he recruited another tech to help out billing at double rate for another day, plus. Even after that, a third tech was called in, who did finally get the new printer working in about 1 hour. Unbelievably the techs submitted 40 hours of billable time to the customer to install this printer.
Rightfully so, the customer called a meeting with our company and refused to pay 5 times or more as much for installation as the cost of the printer.
I'm guessing they have no idea how to do what you want, and they are going to charge you for their education as well as the service.
You already sound like you know how to do this, I'd skip the outside support.
-
I have had installation engineers from printer vendors who are really hopeless and I've ended up doing the driver installations myself because they were so clueless. In their defence, they were basically photocopier repairmen, not Windows techs, but their employers makes them doing work they're not trained for. They're fantastic when it comes to a paper jam.
That's not the case here though. I've been scratching my head a bit.
@Dashrender said:
I'm guessing they have no idea how to do what you want, and they are going to charge you for their education as well as the service.
I'm guessing that too.
-
@Carnival-Boy said:
I have had installation engineers from printer vendors ...
Installation engineer - LOL thanks, I needed that.
-
@Dashrender said:
I'm guessing they have no idea how to do what you want, and they are going to charge you for their education as well as the service.
Which for really special cases they should. Internal IT always charges for that, MSPs do it far less, but it still has to come somewhere. At the end of the day, clients are the only source of revenue so all education is paid for by the clients. There is just more chance of spreading it out over lots of clients rather than all being paid for by one.
-
@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
I'm guessing they have no idea how to do what you want, and they are going to charge you for their education as well as the service.
Which for really special cases they should. Internal IT always charges for that, MSPs do it far less, but it still has to come somewhere. At the end of the day, clients are the only source of revenue so all education is paid for by the clients. There is just more chance of spreading it out over lots of clients rather than all being paid for by one.
So are you saying this is a case where he should be paying them for 3-4 days so they learn how to do this?
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. MSPs are paid $150+/hr because they already know how to do these things, they already spent the money on training and that cost is being spread out over many clients through the higher than hourly cost of the tech, but lower than all of the time learning said skill for the tech.
-
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.
Or to put it another way, if they spent 80% of their time on my site browsing Google, I wouldn't be very impressed!
-
@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.
Or to put it another way, if they spent 80% of their time on my site browsing Google, I wouldn't be very impressed!
I can agree with that. There's also the difference between having no clue, and looking up something on Google to make sure you have the syntax correct, etc.
-
@Dashrender said:
So are you saying this is a case where he should be paying them for 3-4 days so they learn how to do this?
the other option is that OTHER customers who might never use this have to pay. Who should pay, a one off one time customer or every customer?
-
@Dashrender said:
I can agree with that. There's also the difference between having no clue, and looking up something on Google to make sure you have the syntax correct, etc.
That's true, but if you expect anyone in IT to have all the basics all the time, you are going to have a bad time. That's impossible. Part of every IT job is learning as you go. I learn something new at every engagement. Every environment and need is so unique that there is so little "common" knowledge that you have to learn new stuff every time.
Consultants are just IT pros like everyone else. Better resources, more active with more variety, etc. but those issues that plague internal IT plague MSPs too and cannot be avoided.
-
@Dashrender said:
MSPs are paid $150+/hr because they already know how to do these things,
No, that's not why and that mentality is what causes problems. At $150/hr you are getting a normal, midlevel person at a "per hour" rate. That's how much it costs to deliver normal consulting, not for a specialist. Remember, non-IT bench work like GeekSquad is over $100/hr. That's how much it costs to have a minimum wage earner (by the hour) through a firm rather than paying someone an annual salary.
You are NOT paying for 80% of their time to be spent learning stuff somewhere else. Some, yes, like any professional. But the idea that MSPs do 80% of their time without billing and that's why you pay a little more for them by the hour is completely wrong. If that were the case, even midlevel people would be $1,000 an hour.
-
@Dashrender said:
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.
-
@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.
-
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.
-
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?
-
@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
