As we wrote about before technology is moving extremely fast and the role of IT Leaders is shifting from being a cost center to being a key enabler of their organization’s growth and success. Currently however  difficult for IT Leaders and Departments to cater for innovation and digital transformation since their time is divided between three main things:

1. Innovation management & Digital Transformation
2. IT Operations & Maintenance
3. Employee & Budget Management

With over 70% of their time spent on IT Operations IT leaders find it very difficult to build highly effective teams and drive innovation with the business side to digitally transform their organization.

This is why now more than ever IT Leaders need to start considering working with Managed Services Providers (MSPs).

What is a Managed Services Provider?

A managed services provider is a company that takes the responsibility of managing the customer’s IT infrastructure and/or end-user systems. The infrastructure they manage includes servers, storage, networking and security across on-premise and cloud IT Environments. Typically the 70% IT Leaders and departments are spending right now on operations and user management/support can be completely outsourced to MSPs freeing them up to focus on what is really required these days, aligning with their organization’s strategy, drawing and executing a well thought of Digital Transformation Journey. 

However outsourcing IT Operations to a Managed Service Provider isn’t an easy task, a bad MSP can bring more harm than good. Before you decide to take this route there are a number of things that you should consider doing to ensure you partner up with the right MSP. 

Managed Services Provider Checklist

1. Fast Service & Response Time: The secret of working with a top MSP is that you shouldn’t feel that you are working with a different team. The chosen MSP should provide fast and near immediate service and build a quality relationship with you and your team that makes you truly feel as if they are a part of your team.
2. A clear and well defined Service Level Agreement: Fast service and response times are great, but a good MSP will back their offerings with a well defined and structured SLA that provides guarantees and commitments to customers on handling day to day operations and support. Make sure your MSP provides you with that.
3. Third party Vendor Partnerships: Your IT Environment is comprised of multiple solutions from different vendors. Your MSP should have a good and varied relationship with these vendors. This relationship will ensure that  they get the right support and access to a number of benefits/perks that other MSPs don’t have access to. 
4. Proactive Services: Your MSP shouldn’t purely be there to fix issues and problems into your environment. Your MSP should have a clear plan and set of services to proactively monitor your environment, provide upgrades, patches and improvements where and when needed.
5. Remote and Local onsite technical support: With IT people tend to like the thought of being able to do all the work remotely, but the hard reality is if your network is down there is no way for a remote support agent to log in and provide you with support. Your MSP should provide a mixture of near instant remote support and on the ground resources that can mobilize quickly and support ou once needed. 
6. Cyber Security Support: Security is one of the most important, if not the most important item on any IT Leaders menu these days. Your MSP should have a clear and ongoing plan on how to secure your IT Assets and keep all incoming/outgoing connections secure. But most importantly you need to make sure that your MSP is secure.
7. Compliance Support: Regulatory frameworks are growing (GDPR, NIST, etc…) requiring businesses to implement specific measures in their environment, failure to do so resulting in costly fines and other penalties to your business. Your MSP should have a clear way of implementing these frameworks and keeping them up to date. 
8. Disaster Recovery & Business Continuity Support: Your MSP should ensure your applications and data are secure at all times and have the ability to restore it in response to critical errors or cyber breaches. Furthermore your MSP should in alignment with you put in place a failover mechanism wherein if one data center fails, your data will rollover to another data center in a different location.

Managed Services Provider Questionnaire

With the above being said, we have compiled a list of questions to ask when assessing the available options:

1. Do you offer an IT Help Desk?
2. What partnerships do you have with third party vendors?
3. Do you have local resources?
4. Do you have a team to support our cyber security requirements?
5. What compliance frameworks do you support?
6. Do you provide network/data/application monitoring?
7. What list of proactive services do you provide?
8. Do you provide disaster recovery and business continuity services?
9. Are your staff members certified
10. Do you have experience working with infrastructure and applications similar to yours
11. Does the MSP guaranteed uptime, resolution rates and issue response times in it’s SLA

Final Words

MSPs these days are able to offer you more reliable options that often far outweigh the benefits of maintaining your own legacy in-house data centers. If you are considering investing your time and effort aligning your IT Strategy with the business and supporting it to improve it’s growth and revenue generation working with an MSP is mandatory. We hope the hints we provided in this document are able to help you.

BluGrass  is a member of Exceeders and is specialized in providing Infrastructure managed services.

Aspida is a member of Exceeders and is specialized in providing managed security services.

Exceeders Collaboration Agreement  is an Exceeder offering that combines services, solutions and products from hundreds of service providers and vendors in one yearly agreement that is built to support any organization’s transformation plan.

Project management dates back to the early 1950s in its contemporary form, although its roots date back to the latter years of the 19th century. A defined method of project management emerged as companies realized the advantages of organizing job around projects-recognizing the critical need to communicate and coordinate work across departments and professions.

Project management relies mainly on planning, handling and arranging the funds accessible. Some of the components of project management are to direct the project team effectively through all stages and effectively implement the project. Other operations include the identification and efficient management of the life cycle of the project and its implementation in the user-centric development method.

Definition of Project Management

Project Management Institute (PMI) defined Project Management as "the application of knowledge, skills, tools and techniques to a broad range of activities in order to meet the requirements of a particular project."

An easy project management definition involves a few main premises: 

1. project management is no small challenge.
2. The management of the project has a definite start and end. It's not an ongoing method.
3. Project management utilizes different instruments to evaluate performance and monitor project tasks. These include structures for work breakdown, charts for Gantt and charts for PERT.
4. Projects often need resources that are ad-hoc rather than committed, prevalent full-time positions in organizations.
5. Project management lowers risk and improves opportunities for achievement.

Often, a triangle is used to summarize project management, frequently referred to as the "triple constraint." Time, price and range are the three most significant variables. These shape the vertices as the main feature of value.

Image source

Generally, there are four key elements in the “triple constraint”: 

1. projects must be cost-effective.
2. Projects need to be delivered on time.
3. There must be scope for projects.
4. Projects must satisfy the demands of client quality.

Phases of Project Management

A project runs through six stages during its lifecycle: 

1. Project Definition: Defining the objectives, priorities and critical success factors for the project
2. Project Initiation: Everything needed to build up the project before the job can begin 
3. Project Planning: Detailed instructions on how the project will be carried out, including moment, price and resource estimates 
4. Project Execution: Working to deliver the product, service or desired outcome 
5. Project Monitoring & Control: Ensuring that a project remains on track and taking corrective action to ensure completion of the project: 
6. Project Closure: Formal acceptance of the deliverables and disbandment of all the elements required to run the project

Role of a Project Manager

Accountability of the entire project is the role of the project manager. The task of the project manager is to guide, monitor and regulate the project from start to finish. Project managers should not perform the tasks within the project - it is sufficient to manage the project. Here are some of the operations undertaken by a project manager:

1. The project manager has to identify the project, decrease it to a collection of manageable activities, get adequate funds and create a squad to do the job.
2. The project manager has to set the project's ultimate objective and motivate the project squad to finish the project on time.
3. The project manager must regularly report advancement to all stakeholders.
4. The project manager must evaluate and monitor and mitigate the hazards to the project.
5. No project will ever go as scheduled. Project managers need to know how to adapt and handle the transition.

Project Manager's Skill Set

A project manager must have a range of competencies:

1. Leadership
2. People management 
3. Effective communication 
4. Influencing
5. Negotiation
6. Conflict management
7. Planning
8. Contract management
9. Estimating
10. Problem-solving
11. Creative thinking
12. Time management

Projects and project management procedures differ with each project due to their size and complexity. Project managers should gather a thorough knowledge of project demands and implement all stages of project management to perform the project efficiently.

Project management is all about establishing an atmosphere and circumstances for achieving a specific goal or objective with a group of individuals in a monitored way.

If you are acquainted with what project management entails, from the phase to mitigating everything that might (and often does) go right, you will influence the end outcome-whether you are first involved in a project methodology or a trained professional.

Are you a project manager and want to join Exceeders' ever growing team? 

Check out our latest job vacancies today!

Did you know that you are probably overspending on your organization’s digital transformation? Instead, you could spend less and get more. Here’s what you need to know about the cost of digital transformation.

Valuable Applications That Cost Too Much

More than 6000 applications are launched daily. These applications are built in a user-friendly way to solve specific problems.

Businesses need them… But sadly, most of the enterprise companies can’t know about or reach these new, innovative solutions.

Companies spend millions of dollars on solutions that are coming from specific software vendors. At the same time, they could use more innovative and economical IT solutions that reduce the cost significantly, while offering equally high-quality solutions that work for enterprises. 

Why the Cost of Digital Transformation is Still High (Even Though it Doesn’t Need to be)

So why are companies still overspending on their digital transformation, even though there are better solutions available?

Here’s the thing: Companies are still relying on local IT companies along with giant IT software companies to provide them with software solutions. 

But exclusively relying on those two types of providers isn’t sustainable. IT can get extremely expensive with international branded software vendors. If a company limits itself to a specific vendor, it can easily be overcharged. 

Fortunately, there is a better way. 

How Can the Cost of Digital Transformation be Fixed?

So what are the alternatives to traditional, inflexible, and expensive IT providers? 

Simple. Think about consumer applications.

Before there was anything like Apple and Google Store, there weren’t that many consumer application solutions around, and most consumer software was costly. But with these app stores, it became more accessible than ever to use and access thousands of applications that can be installed with just one click and with very reasonable price.

Why aren’t enterprise solutions the same? Companies should be able to get IT solutions in the same way that consumers can find consumer apps. 

In one place, enterprises should be able to find flexible, secure, and cost-effective solutions that work for many different needs and enterprises of various sizes. 

At Exceeders, we do just that. We provide companies with IT solutions that are cost-effective, as well as secure, easy to access, and use. 

Our store works much like Apple’s and Google’s stores. Our Exceeders store offers enterprises the ability to find innovative solutions and facilitate the use of them. 

Our clients love our solution because it frees up a lot of time and money that would typically go into IT development. 

Want to Reduce the Cost of Digital Transformation at Your Organization?

There you have it. Now you know how enterprises can find cost-effective and modern ways to enable their digital transformation.

If you’re searching for better IT solutions, take a look at our Exceeders store to find enterprise applications that enable your organization to benefit from digital transformation fully.