MANTRA 7: Ensure that your team works

What good is technology if you don't have the right people to manage it? It's important therefore that you have a proper strategy in place to find, retain and get the best people who can manage your IT infrastructure. There are several points to consider when devising manpower strategy. It's not an easy task and needs permanent attention. For one, the IT team has amongst the most tech savvy people in the organization. They're the ones who run the entire infrastructure, be it troubleshooting desktops, or tuning servers, or administrating the business applications. They would have a hard time working under a boss who doesn't understand technology that well. Supporting users is one of the most thankless jobs. No matter how hard the team tries to fix problems, there will always be complains and dissatisfaction. The classic fights between users and the IT team will always remain, and unfortunately, it's your team who could end up getting demotivated. Keeping their motivational levels up is a challenge that has to be met. Having said that, technology changes almost every day. Obviously, you wouldn't be changing technologies in your organization as fast, but it's important nevertheless to keep your manpower updated with the latest, and also give them proper training from time to time. Manpower attrition is the other major challenge you have to cope with. Even if you do give your team extensive training, they would use this opportunity to learn and move out of the organization for greener pastures. There's nothing wrong with that because everybody wants to grow in life. However, you have to ensure that this doesn't affect your IT infrastructure in any way. Managing an IT team therefore is no bed of roses, and if you want to have a smooth running network, you need to have the right strategy to have a working team, and a team that works out.

Inhouse or outsourced?



All of the above tasks of managing an IT team are quite challenging. One way out is to outsource. This has become one of the hottest buzzwords in the IT world today. After all the noise on global outsourcing, wherein foreign countries outsource work to India, it's now time for Indian organizations to completely outsource their IT infrastructure to a managed service provider or MSP. Earlier, it used to be just the teams that would get outsourced along with an AMC. Today, however, you can go beyond that and outsource your complete IT infrastructure, together with the manpower, IT equipment, applications, and the works. So far, some Indian banks have adopted this strategy, and various government projects are using a somewhat similar approach. The government follows what's called the Build, Own, Operate, Transfer model, or BOOT for short, wherein the entire project, it's implementation, products sourcing, maintenance, etc are given to somebody on a revenue sharing basis. The operator would set up the whole thing, run it for sometime and eventually hand it over to the government to run.

These contracts are fairly long term to the tune of 10 years, and the deals are worth huge amounts. In fact, organizations can choose how much of their infrastructure would they like to outsource. It might even be too early to tell of how well would this work, but it's definitely worth exploring. It's, therefore, important to choose the right Managed Services Provider

(MSP).

Benefits of going the MSP way



It removes all your day-to-day burdens of keeping the team motivated, finding and training the right people. Plus, your company won't have the burden of paying salary and other overheads to the team. You don't have to figure out how many people you need to manage the infrastructure. The MSP will worry about that. Plus, the MSP will also manage all technology changes, software upgrades and updates, and the performance monitoring. The risk of changes in technology, product obsolescence, etc, belongs to the MSP. While this does sound lucrative, keep in mind that you also become entirely dependant on the external agency. The team no longer reports directly to you. If you have a problem with somebody in the team, you'll have to go through the MSP for a change. It therefore becomes very important to establish the right equations with the

MSP.

What all can be outsourced?



MSPs offer all kinds of services, and taking up the onus of the complete IT infrastructure is as extreme as it can get. But that doesn't mean that there are no other choices. It's a growing market, where you can choose from a wide range of services.

These include everything from routine maintenance to solution monitoring, technical support, management of specific operations such as backup/recovery, appli- cations, assets and security. Monitoring can be done for the network, databases and various applications. Nowadays, the concept of remote monitoring is picking up, wherein the MSP will check everything from his own network operations center.

Choosing the right MSP



Before proceeding further, you have to analyze your current cost of maintaining your IT infrastructure with your in-house team. This doesn't include just the cost of salaries, but also the cost of all the equipment you're buying, the cost of AMCs, downtime if any, and many others. Unless and until you get a significant saving in this cost, to the tune of 25 to 30%, there's no point of going for an MSP. First do your homework and work out all the costings, and then get a couple of MSPs to assess your infrastructure.

Likewise, choosing an MSP is more than getting great service and technical skills. It's about building trust, because you're going to be working with the MSP for many years, sharing responsibilities, communication, etc. Since you're entrusting an outsider to manage everything for you, it's important that you choose the right one.

Remember that when signing such a contract, you're binding your organization with an MSP for a very long period of time. Whether you'll be completely at the mercy of the MSP or not depends upon how you manage it. If you thought managing your own inhouse IT team was easier, then imagine managing a team that doesn't even report to you. So the relations become even more important.

Create a well-defined SLA



Service level agreement or SLA has become more important than ever before. It has to be as detailed as possible to cover all possible aspects of the management. It should put in detail all the deliverables expected of the MSC, what's the desired level of quality. The more detailed it is, the better.