Anyone who’s ever been subjected to ‘meetings about meetings’ knows the frustration and cost of starting a project without the appropriate planning. When it comes to changes or upgrades to your company’s or agency’s IT, whether that’s infrastructure, software or outsourced services, knowing your budget and defining your priorities upfront are the key to success.
With IT budget, you should know the figure you’re working with from the get-go, so if there are any question marks hanging over it or approval has an ongoing ‘TBC’ status, it’s wise to hold off on putting together your IT Roadmap until you have a proper green light.
Otherwise, you could find yourself eating into an unknown budget with unrealistic goals and end up wasting valuable resources.
Setting your priorities should be a collaborative process. You may know them inside out and be happy to brief them directly to your IT service provider. However, alternatively, you might value an expert second opinion or sense check from an IT consultancy service: Someone who can look at the business without bias and use their experience and expertise to make recommendations on where your budget can make the most impact.
Securing budget for IT outsourcing is the first step. From there, it’s about understanding your business needs and matching them with a suitable service provider.
To do that well, we recommend asking a few key questions of your own business up-front. That way you can go into the pitch process with vendors with clear objectives and realistic expectations.
Here are some questions to get you thinking about the topics you’ll want to cover.
- Do you know your IT budget and what it needs to cover?
This is key for refining your provider search and creating a strong brief, bearing in mind your budget may be expected to cover ‘business as usual’ servicing, existing contracts, software licensing fees, staff training, etc.
Being clear about what you have to spend will allow you to find the best provider and deliver realistic change for the business, fast.
Remember, some services will incur VAT too. A good tip is to ask providers to always show prices inclusive of VAT. Spending up, only to realise you need to find an additional 23%, is a costly mistake.
- Are you clear about your IT requirements or do you need expert help?
Don’t be afraid to ask for help if you need it, it’s what IT providers do best – assessing businesses and making suggestions for improvement, without being compromised by working for one department or another.
If you have the benefit of sound in-house expertise and you know exactly what you need, it’s a good idea to sense check the plan with the rest of the business and document agreement from across the board. That way you can be confident your IT plan supports the wider business agenda and won’t be questioned down the track.
- Do you have service level expectations or specific dates in mind for development work?
Day-to-day IT management can benefit from service level agreements, so everybody is clear on typical turnaround times for everything from simple helpdesk queries to more technical issue management. Having an effective and efficient ticket management system in place, whether that is internally or through a virtual CIO, will help a great deal in keeping track of the fixes and upgrades your business needs, and if you don’t have this in place, it is worth asking whether an outsourced IT company works off one.
For project work, IT service providers will be able to tell you pretty quickly how soon they can start working for you and once they have tasks fully scoped, how long you can expect the project to take. They should also be able to show clearly how and when tasks were dealt with, so you can gauge whether they are doing the job to your expectations.
If, however, timescales aren’t up for debate or you have strict completion deadlines that have been set by the business or industry regulators, such as with the implementation of GDPR compliance practices, for example, you need to flag those dates and obligations up-front.
That way providers can politely decline, or pitch, implement and support the plans with full appreciation of your targets.
- Are there any project or delivery specifics you need to make clear?
This could be anything from the language or code base you use, to working with a provider that has specific industry experience.
If it’s important, it should be included in the very first conversation, to avoid the risk of wasting time, money and resources.
- Do you understand your business’s priorities?
What’s important to you or your team might differ wildly to another person or department, so it make sense to agree the overall priorities of the business, with management team consensus.
That way you can channel the IT budget accordingly, safe in the knowledge that you have 100% support.
Developers will also benefit from clear priorities and an order of importance (if there is one) when it comes to things such as:
- Time to market
- Design
- Brand or customer experience
- Cyber Security
- Scalability
- Operational or customer support
These are just some questions to get you thinking, but it’s safe to assume any IT outsourcing company you work with will come up with lots more. And that’s a good thing. Going into meetings with a view to sharing as much detail as you can and asking questions of each other is the best way to kickstart a collaborative relationship that will not only meet your IT service requirements but steer your business on the right track towards innovation and growth.
Find out how outsourced IT services and solutions can help your business grow by downloading our eBook on The Role Of IT In Your Growing Agency:
