MSP Consulting Services 2024

Published 3 days ago5 min readKBS Vendor Portal...

I.T Consulting Services will be the delightful discussion in today's article. A rather expansive topic I am sure you would agree. It could incorporate pretty much any task from backups to application support. For the purposes of this article, I am going to keep it within the confines of strategic and business topics we face as IT consultants.

I started my life in I.T as a computer consultant within a couple years of entering the IT industry. In my mind there are a number of activities that an IT consultant undertakes that sets them apart and I am going to go through those in sections below.

My specialty is I.T documentation framework strategies and I will be weaving in a bit of my favorite topic whenever it seems appropriate and let's face it, it is always appropriate.

While you are here, Take a look at some of our other Tech Consulting related articles below that may interest you:

IT Consulting Services - Definition

I am probably quite biased when it comes to my view on the difference in an IT consultant compared to an internal IT resource that either works for a single company or works for a single client over a long time period even if their parent company has many clients.

There is just something incredibly terrifying about walking into an environment that you have never seen before and being expected to solve tech problems within that environment.

Being forced to do this hundreds of times over a period of not less than 5 years causes a significant change within a technical support person's internal troubleshooting capabilities and there is no other activity that takes its place.

Just like anything that you are required to do hundreds of times, eventually the fear disappears until that point in time where you can walk through any door like a conquering shirtless man on a horse knowing that no matter what is on the other side, your technical ability is not as important as the internal blueprint on how to handle the problem.

Which Business Would Benefit From Internal IT Staff?

There are certainly business types that are far better served in having an internal IT support desk or an entire technology division. Any business that has a large overhead of security protocols and compliance issues such as a financial corporation like a bank or a healthcare entity like a hospital could be likely better served by retaining and training their own inhouse IT department.

These organizations need to be of a certain size and my experience would suggest that any organization below 60 staff is likely to be worse off employing internal tech support staff.

This is because it costs a significant amount to hire, train and retain highly skilled IT employees and often they will need to be trained in a very narrow focused area of expertise to ensure they work within the confines of whatever regulations they fall under.

The larger businesses are likely able to pay the high wages that tech management personnel command and are able to foster a culture that encourages long term retention that can be counted sometimes in decades.

Being able to retain a core key group that is capable of recruiting other technical staff means they will retain that expertise and likely have a better set of capabilities than if they outsourced their IT services.

This does not mean that these organizations remain 100% internal, often they will retain a higher level of skill so they manage the core IT services within the business while outsourcing components they do not want to micromanage so think of areas such as voice over IP, printers, firewalls and network switches so that they retain management of these items at a high level however delegate the day to day running of this equipment.

It is not unusual for a large organization to have an internal IT department and 5 or more technology based vendors that they will delegate work to.

Which Business Would Benefit From IT Consulting Services?

If you thought the exact opposite of above then you would be right. In my experience, a company will benefit from total control of their IT department including management and direction from an external organization if they have less than 60 staff and do not belong to a regulation heavy industry that requires specialist training.

It all comes down to economies of scale. The cost of running an IT department to the same standard as an IT Consulting organization can be extraordinarily high, hundreds of thousands of dollars a year if you take into account wages, software, training and recruitment.

When you consider that organizations this size often have zero competence when it comes to IT related knowledge, the very thought of having to recruit an IT resource can be a daunting task.

You may think that IT recruitment organizations are able to fill this gap. I have had significant experience with IT recruitment companies on both sides of the fence and they are filled by sharks that are happy to scrape fat commissions off the top of salaries while not having a clue about the technical requirements the clients need or the applicants have. There are some good ones but the odds are stacked against companies that use them.

Are IT Consulting Services Better Than Inhouse IT?

As usual the answer is it depends. Client organizations under 100 staff will have to outlay significant costs towards MSP applications such as Connectwise PSA, an RMM tool and a documentation platform like ITGlue to name a few and these are big ticket significant costs that are ongoing.

Unlike a service provider, you cannot purchase them with the idea of turning a profit, they will be a dead weight to the business and the way with which technology vendors such as Kaseya operate, without a depth of experience on how underhanded they can be, well it is like leading a lamb to the slaughter.

By using an I.T consulting organization to offload the tasks of a traditional inhouse IT department, all of the items that would be high risk low reward can now be offloaded to an organization that has far more experience in the day to day tasks such as remote monitoring of the installed backup solution, that are required to be undertaken for far less cost and risk involved.

Aim Of I.T Consulting Services

IT Consulting organizations and those that provide services for a fixed fee have an aim or should have the aim to normalize their standards across all clients and the closer a service provider gets to making each of their clients as identical as possible in all areas from laptop rollouts, NAS solutions, thin clients or vendor firewalls standardization as a small example, the more profitable, reliable and effective the service provider will become.

As an example, if a IT consulting company makes a decision that they will not take on a new client unless they commit to replace all in place firewalls and switching gear with Meraki hardware then sure they will not convert as many potential clients across from the sales process but the ones they do bring across will end up being far more profitable.

If you use that strategy across all technologies then over time it will cost your organization less to maintain than say another computer consulting company that brings on clients no matter what networking vendor they use (as an example).

The aim of a computer consulting organization is to get as close to being an internal IT department as possible so that every client has identical setups across the board.

Shortage Of IT Technical Talent

Not only is there always a shortage of competent technical employees out there, it is all but impossible for anyone non technical to be able to sort through a list and be confident they have made a good choice for the short list.

Then there is trying to retain good talent. Service providers and consultancy organizations are likely to have better luck at this and the biggest advantage for a client engaging with a consultancy service is that churning of technically skilled staff should be all but transparent to them instead of a major headache.

That is not to say it is all perfect. Service providers generally do have quite a high staff turnover due to the high stress involved with the job. Internal departments have a far lower turnover.

Systems and Processes

Unless it is a large organization, running an internal IT department is likely to fall short in having rigid documentation processes and procedures in place. Any IT consulting service worth its salt these days is going to have at least a basic documentation system in place.

With an average service provider servicing around 150 clients, they will generally have a process of capturing information in a way that makes it easily available compared to attempting to do the same with only a single organization.

Conclusion

It really is as simple as the tile laying analogy. You can quite easily lay tiles yourself although it means going out and buying a tile saw and other equipment that is only used once and at the end of the job as long as you stand back far enough and squint your eye a little, you are happy with how it turned out.

Unfortunately along with the initial tool outlay you also have to deal with the fact that the guy who has been doing it 8 hours a day for the last 30 years and who owns all his tools will certainly charge you what you initially believe to be excessive but then they do it in quarter the time you would have, have existing relationships with relevant vendors and the end result is 10 times better.

With it getting more difficult to navigate IT related tasks internally and the need for a trusted advisor that is likely to have seen your problem 100 times before instead of facing it for the first time, IT consulting services are a more cost effective solution to managing a company's IT infrastructure.

There is no doubt we have all been lied to over time, believing advances in technology would make it all so much easier and yet it just seems to get more complicated. Using an I.T consulting service will ensure that not only will you have more of a chance at having access to trained professionals at a reasonable cost but also because they specialize in providing technical services, if an individual technician does not have the answer, they can crowdsource the question amongst their colleagues.

We have a number of other MSP consulting related articles listed below that will provide you with more detailed information on a number of related topics:

https://optimizeddocs.com/blogs/consulting/consulting-index-page-01

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