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.

I just had to wear make-up for the second time in my life

For only the second time in my life I was forced to wear some foundation. The reason for this was because I was filming my first ever online video and apparently I am a little shiny - I could have told them that.

I wont tell you about the other time unless you know me very well.

Any way, I digress, this was the first meaningful time that I had to do a video recording that was direct to camera and not as part of a speech at a wedding. I was absolutely shocked at how much harder this is than it appears.

I have no problem at all in talking, in fact it is the thing I enjoy most about my job, talking to people, but trying to talk to an imaginary person in the middle of a wide angle lens is something quite different. Earlier in the day I had prepared my 'script' and had even done a practise audio recording. It was all very concise and fluid and I thought the recording would be a doddle.

I wanted to get across who I was(Jamie Claret - in case you were unsure) and to tell everyone a little about my business - The PC Surgery

How wrong was I!

The first problem, after the make up, was the fact that I had to try and remember what I wrote down. This is actually very tricky and confirmed that I will not pursue a career in EastEnders. Once I had got over that, the problem was trying to sound as natural as possible whilst not looking at notes or at the other person in the room. Instead I was talking into the deep void of a lens.

It was OK once I got used to it but the outtakes will be far more amusing than the edited version. I didn't realise how much I swore when things went wrong!

Time will tell how the edit comes out but It will be posted here, fresh from the cutting room floor and I would be interested in any feedback. In the meantime I am off to learn this new skill which I thought I had, but evidently I didn't!

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