Blade Watch

I was having a coffee with an IT manager that’s been working on upgrading the server infrastructure, he needed to upgrade their SMS 2.0 infrastructure, he didn’t have specific internal experience, and wanted a guy brought in just to deploy it, share a bit of knowledge and get it up and working, not have an engineer do it as part of the five year plan.

He’d sent out a purchase request through the IT purchasing route:

“I need a Windows Server engineer to deploy our new SMS infrastructure, as part of a business as usual upgrade project.”

The interesting thing was the response, the figures quoted back from three independent service providers were:

• Entry level engineer with training and experience – £700 per day for an 8 hour day
• Club class subject expert – £1000 per day

His sense of irritation? Not that the quality of the people would not be up to his requirements, it was not an issue of trust with the organizations or budgets so to speak, it was and I quote:

1. That’s twice what we pay for an external contractor to come in from outside
2. The quotation excludes any facility for providing on call escalation should we want to call the guy during the contract – that’s extra
3. The quotation excludes charges for working extra hours, he is contracted for 8 hours, anytime over that gets billed to me
4. They are paying the guy around a third of that maybe a little more, I feel their operational costs and profit margin are not only excessive, they detract from me bothering
5. How do they expect me to cross charge/absorb this cost?
   1. It’s not their problem, but we can easily make it so, it is their problem if they want to get the guy in the door for revenue.
   2. It’s a business as usual project – there is no budget – the business users see this project as an IT project, an IT problem to be paid from current budgets/funds
   3. We might hire a guy on slightly lower cost for a longer term

We have to pay for services, for people and for technologies that we want, we need to fund the benefit we seek to obtain, but I wonder how much business is being lost, or not realized as a result of a lack of dialogue, discussion, had the response been just that little bit less the organization might have committed to the project, and kept the guy on doing support, or those in house tasks/upgrades that we just can’t declare we’re doing on the books as part of upgrading the infrastructure – you doing Service pack upgrades or support, the answer is always support, always delivering business benefit. Upgrading service packs, is an IT cost, we’ll see…

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