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 tas

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 e

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

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

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

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 appo

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 i

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 skille