A guest post about bananas

I have been doing some mingling lately. A recent mingle led me to meet the bizarre but faintly entertaining Katie Millman, wife of James Millman.



Usually we meet at approximately 8am every other Tuesday at one of the networking events that go to.



All very jolly and fun.



The guest blog was all about eating bananas and how to be nice enjoy(click the bicep to read it)


or click this if the thought of clicking on a half man, half Katie Millman repels you.

What are your support company ACTUALLY doing for you?

I had a meeting today with an account manager of a large IT Support company. We were discussing the good things and bad things that her employer did and how good or badly they support their clients.

One matter which got raised was to do with backup monitoring and how badly her existing employers did this. I was shocked but not at all surprised. Many companies offer a full range of what are termed as 'managed services'. A Managed Service is a concept where the provider takes over the control of the monitoring of your IT systems and fixes the problems before you even know about it.

This is great and a worthwhile service to have, we offer it ourselves. The problem arises when the company providing the service have a 'set and forget' attitude to the monitoring. There are lots of areas I could talk about here but the most important one, and the one that often gets overlooked is the backups.

The backup, which is never appreciated or taken seriously unless something goes wrong, is THE most critical element of your system. It is only when something goes horribly wrong and there is NO backup that it seems to focus the mind!

many managed service providers claim to be monitoring your backup, but to what extent? and more importantly , how do you KNOW they are?

Many companies still use tape backups but I cannot tell you how many I have walked into and they could not tell me the last time someone tried to extract some data from the tape, its scary!

At The PC Surgery we have a daily backup routine which is checked against all of our clients every single day. If we do not receive a successful notification or if there is an error we have an internal SLA(Service Level Agreement) to ensure that the problem is resolved AND tested. Yes this is time consuming and yes this is a cost to us BUT if we get the phone call that all support companies hate - "Hello, our server is dead" we can relax knowing that the backups were completed and successful.

Good staff vs. great staff

Yesterday was a better than average day in the office and I would say this is all down to my staff, who are fantastic.

One reads a lot about how the most successful companies always hire the best people, and to some extent, regardless of cost. Once upon a time I did not have this view, as a young busines I thought it was best to shave costs as much as possible, including wages. Whilst there is a time and place for this I have learnt that in order to grow one must get the best one can afford.

We have recently been through the process of hiring an additional technician for the team and after three months of looking, combined with a relatively quiet month, decided to put hiring on hold for a few months.

Of course you know what happens next, its the last interview we have, and the candidate is fantastic. I had written off the budget by this point and so now had to really justify the expense. However when a candidate has that certain 'x' factor you realise that you would be stupid not to.

And it's that 'x' factor which has become so important to the business. Whilst we may be one of thousands of IT companies around the country, I would argue that I have one of the best teams around. My staff are more than capable technically but beyond that they possess a genuine warmth and sense of care to our clients and each other.

These are exciting times and I am pleased I have such a great team to grow the business even further