Is it time for you to engage a managed service provider? A managed service provider will free up your engineering team, allowing them to concentrate on creative, value-building projects. MSPs are valuable whenever there are tasks that can be managed by those who have understanding of the products and services that make up your IT infrastructure. When Should You Engage a Managed Service Provider? 1. When your engineering team is being used for routine tasks. When routine tasks are occupying valuable engineering resource time, it's usually best to engage a service that specializes in maintenance, monitoring, and incident response. Engineering resource time should be spent on innovative and m

The last entry of our SMART Assessment Services is Timely. Timely has two components. The first being the one we’re most accustomed to– how does the output relate to my current and soon-to-be situation? But the second is a bit more abstract. Each organization is on its own path. Some organizations are ready to hit the ground and run a marathon, while other organizations are only ready for a 5K. An assessment must take this into account. We’ve all heard the joke, “How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time!” But this also applies to assessments. Giving an organization a marathon action plan when they can only handle a 5K will render the assessment useless. The action plan may be the corre

The R in our SMART Assessment series is Relevant. We were reading through some assessments and ran across a data center risk assessment where “meteor strike” was listed as a risk. Meteor strike. Is it a risk? The sun could blow up. It’s a risk. Okay, sure, but how relevant is that, really? When you’re having a risk assessment done, you’re looking for actual risks. Not risks that have a .0001% likelihood. Or risks that have essentially no mediation. Assessments have started to garner a bad reputation because too many dubious vendors are providing irrelevant assessments. In an effort to cover their behinds, they list every possible risk, regardless of probability. That way it appears they’ve d

In our SMART Assessment series we’re talking about the “A.” Actionable. We are firm believers that an assessment must have actionable steps in order to be valuable. Most assessments today are academic in nature. Full of information, yes, but leaving you to figure out how to apply that information. There’s nothing wrong with academic writing. There is nothing wrong with research– except when that is done on your dime! You’re not looking to add to the knowledge universe, you in need of help. Why do so many consultants avoid creating actionable plans? Because it’s so much easier to simply redefine the problem and talk about possible risks. Coming up with actionable steps requires real understan

M in our SMART Assessment stands for Meaningful. Let’s take a quick look at the definition of meaningful: “having a serious, important, or useful quality or purpose.” Useful quality. Remember the Friends episode where Joey wants to “sound smart” in a letter of recommendation he was attempting to write, so he changed every word using a thesaurus? How many times have you had an assessment done and the report was 100 pages of gibberish? Where it sounded like the consultants ran the document through a thesaurus in order to “sound smart?” How useful is that? Too many assessments are all garnish and no meat. Sure, the report looks pretty. Wonderful graphs and charts– and, gee, these words are big,

Welcome to our SMART Assessments series. Remember Sesame Street? Every day the show featured a letter of the day. Today’s letter is “S.” For us, the S in our SMART system stands for Strategic. When you engage someone to do an assessment for you, it’s usually because you have a problem you’re trying to understand. Picture this: you’re feeling some pain and go to the doctor. They record your weight and height, take your blood pressure and temperature, and at the end of the appointment hand you a record of that data. You (wisely) ask, “But, Doc, what about my pain?” The doctor shrugs and walks away. How happy would you be about that engagement? Too many assessment providers use assessments as a

If you’ve been in the corporate world for any amount of time, chances are you’ve had some sort of assessment done on your organization. Most of those assessments? Felt like you were reading the phone book. In Russian. It’s even worse in the IT space, where assessments have become an opportunity for the vendor to showcase how smart they are. These companies seem to take pleasure in knowing that by page 32 of 159, you’re going to be fast asleep. Enough is enough. Our team has invested more time than our competitors in how technology is used to drive business results. Our approach provides actionable– not academic– recommendations. Bonus? We’re a services organization, which means we aren’t int

Engineers and operators have substantially different roles, even though they may appear to interface with similar technologies. It's a common mistake to hire an individual for their engineering skills and then to slowly shift their role into mundane (but necessary) operational tasks. However, when this occurs, you cease to get the true value from your engineering hire– and you risk losing them entirely. The Evolution of the Engineer to the Operator Engineers are highly skilled individuals who should be primarily focused on innovation and improvement. Nevertheless, the temptation to shift operational responsibility to their purview is always present– after all, they understand the systems in