Hire an IT expert

It’s an age old saying that if you want something done right you should hire an expert, whether you’re doing building work on your house, fixing a car or implementing an IT solution.  The reality is that whilst you could invest internal resources to plan and implement a change, you’re almost certainly going to be better to hire an expert who has been there, done that and got the T-shirt.

In-house IT vs External IT Support Consultants

A typical in-house IT Manager/Engineer has to be a generalist, not a specialist.  They may carry out one major email system migration every 3 or 5 years when the business makes a change.  During this time, they will also be involved in a variety of different projects, ranging from desktop refreshes, phone system replacements, connectivity changes, firewall and network upgrades etc.

A external IT support consultant specialises in carrying out multiple similar projects every few weeks or months.  It’s conceivable that they could easily carry out 10-20 email migrations in a single year for different clients with different requirements.  This frequency allows the consultant to become very adept in avoiding common mistakes and really know how to make the change smooth, seamless and trouble free as possible so your business is as unaware that an infrastructure change is even taking place.

Hiring an external IT support consultant also means that you have additional resource available from a whole team of engineers with varying depths of experience across various technologies.  This can be invaluable as in most infrastructure environments, technologies overlap so looking at one aspect in isolation is never a good plan.

This expert advice and experience doesn’t just make the delivery of the project run smoothly but it also helps you make the right choice when choosing a solution.  Their experience in what’s worked for similar businesses in the past can provide a valuable steer to the decision you’ll make. 

Modern IT Managers are typically facilitators of IT that carry out the necessary due diligence to appoint to best supplier to deliver the project - that supplier could be Messaging247.

Our Approach and Your Involvement

Before we start any project we like to find out how much you and your staff want or need to be involved.  Sometimes we’re asked to just make it happen and involve people at key stages only when we really need to.  In other situations, we’re asked to work as closely with the IT staff and business as possible.

Whenever possible, we feel that it’s good to have your IT staff involved.  After all, when we’ve completed the project, your staff will need to maintain and support the environment moving forwards, so it’s important that they understand how it all works.  Many of our projects are carried out alongside our client’s IT staff and they will learn about the technology we’re implementing.  They’ll get valuable insights into why particular decisions are being made and why things are being setup in a certain way.  Having this personal interaction is far more valuable than your staff reading numerous and potentially conflicting internet guides on how to deploy a product.

Another advantage to our approach is that by involving your staff in the project, they may identify tasks which they can carry out.  For example, on an email migration there may be changes which need making on workstations, updates which need applying or software which needs installing.  Your IT staff may well have the skills and time to do this themselves so we’re more than happy for them to do this and you can save some money - it means you’re only paying us to do tasks that you can’t do yourself by hiring an expert.