Organizations who opt for managed IT services are likely to tell you that it is a painful task to find vendors, and trust them with their IT ecosystem. Typically, businesses look out for IT vendors who can seamlessly integrate into their system. This may include vendors with

  • Good industry experience
  • Familiarity with the tools

When your organization is facing a resource crunch, and you are under tremendous pressure to ensure that all major workflows are running smoothly- and all you want is to relieve stress. Managed services is an option you would like to consider despite the bitter task of hunting for potential vendors, budget planning, attending multiple meetings etc. If it works out, it is a long-term win. Further, it is a good option when you want to focus all your tech bandwidth on core areas. However, there are a few mistakes that companies generally make that should be avoided at all costs if the dream is to scale the business while not adding to your existing pile of tasks. And they are listed as follows-

Lack of Clarity in Plan Of Action

You might be well aware, but is your team?

Misunderstandings between the vendor and your business exist because it wasn’t clearly discussed under the scope of work. And it is equally important to make sure that everyone including your IT team is aware of the same. The solution is clearly defining your goals, objectives, and scope of the project. This will ensure that both parties are in sync and there will be little confusion or room for micromanagement.

Starting Big

Even if they are a huge corporate entity, always start on a smaller project if possible. This way, it will be easier for you to understand how the vendor functions and if they are the right team to hire for all the future projects of the business. It is difficult to switch vendors in-between crucial, long-term projects.

Knowledge Transfer Gap Within Both Firms

If one person from either one of the parties leaves, how quickly can another team member replace this person and get to speed with the project?

It is a commonly ignored issue that negatively impacts the project in more than one way- slowing down operations and decreasing the productivity of the team. It is a good idea to bring this question up while talking to potential vendors and learn how they handle such issues in advance.

Conclusion

The expectations from managed services vendors are quite high. No business can easily find a vendor who is a great match for them, whom they can trust. However, once they do, they stick to a vendor for a really long time as it is not easy to manage IT processes and IT teams in general, whether in-house or outsourced.

Opting for managed services is an excellent idea under three main circumstances-

  • When you face a tech resource crunch, and all your projects still need to run smoothly
  • When you need to hire a big tech team to develop and maintain a particular IT infrastructure. This increases your overall effort in hiring and training the new resources.
  • When you want to focus only on your core activities and leave IT infrastructure management to a trusted long-term partner.

Keeping the aforementioned points in mind while hunting for managed IT services helps reduce the associated risks to a huge extent.