What I hate outsourcing system administration for. Customer perspective

Post anger.

So that my post of anger does not look like a showdown - I deliberately will not call the outsourcing company that serves us. The names in the text are changed by me. I do not seek to blacken my current system administrators. This post is just a cry from the heart, an opportunity to blow off steam a little. And maybe for someone from the system administrators it is interesting to look at the problem through the eyes of a brutal client.
And I would also like to understand - outsourcing administration is always the case ? Or am I just lucky? Or on the contrary, I was very lucky, and the rest is even worse?


So, about two years ago I decided to apply for servicing the computer park of our small architectural bureau to outsourcing system administrators. The company has chosen on the recommendation of intelligent friends. And here we are served by one of the dozens (hundreds?) Of small firms in Default City, they themselves affectionately call themselves "Support."

What do the outsourcing system administration companies call us to? On the site of almost any company offering such services, we will find a comparison between a regular sysadmin, a visiting sysadmin and an outsourcing company. The comparison will be something like this:
Cons coming sysadmin or regular sysadmin: professionalism is limited by his personal knowledge, he goes on vacation and on sick leave, can go on a spree, and in the event of a conflict can badly spoil something (he has all the passwords).
Additional disadvantages of a regular sysadmin: you need to pay a salary (and, accordingly, taxes), requires a separate workplace.
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When concluding an outsourcing service contract, continuous advantages are presented:

• The whole team of professionals works. Each employee specializes in his field.
• Personal manager and attached sysadmin.
• Timely maintenance, proactive repair, replacement, purchase of consumables.
• The collective experience of professionals will always help us to show IT innovations to optimize our business processes.
• Convenient proprietary system of setting and discussing tasks (your task manager)
• For any computer problems, you can get prompt professional advice.
• A wide range of additional services, including repair and maintenance of any computer and office equipment, SKS broach, video surveillance device, installation of ACS or intercom, etc.
• For a small company (say, 15 employees), the cost of such service is about 2 times less than the salary of a permanent sysadmin

What do I get in reality?

Relationship history.
(if reluctance to read multi-letters - you can immediately go to the summary )

The first year we were served by an experienced sysadmin, let's call him Peter. We did not have any personal manager. There were not so many tasks; Peter already understood what to do. He came once a week or two and did ongoing work. In urgent cases, I called him, and he with my hands or by remote access solved the issue, or immediately came to us. But the number of firms he served grew, we also grew, Peter stopped coping with the entire flow of tasks. Sometimes I began to try to delegate part of the tasks to another sysadmin from his company, but without much success. The timing of the tasks began indecently delayed. A stable deadline for an ordinary task instead of a week turned into a month, often more than one month. There were tasks for which literally nothing was done for more than a year. I had to personally monitor the formulation and promotion of almost every task. The funny thing is that small tasks were done within a reasonable time, and large and important tasks that affect critical things in safety or work efficiency ... hung for months.

I got it and I put the question squarely before the director and owner of the company Pavel - that Peter does not cope, that you need to add another employee, and there must also be a manager who will manage all my tasks and be responsible for their implementation on time. I said that since they delayed the deadlines for completing the tasks so much, I would delay the payment for the work and stopped paying. At first, Pavel assured me that 2-3 people were constantly sitting in his office almost continuously monitoring the receipt of tasks, and not a single task could go unnoticed. After a few months of admonishing, with concrete examples of tasks broken for no reason (such as purely technical tasks that require only 15 minutes of work on the remote control, hanging in the manager, with a deadline of several months ago), Pavel finally admitted that there was a problem.
But Paul made a counterclaim - they say we pay little for the service. What was originally a price with a big “friendship” discount, and during this time our bureau has grown, the number of workstations is already twice as much, but the payment has remained the same. Like, what payment, such and service. This argument has enraged me, because I paid exactly as much as I was asked to pay and even did not ask for discounts - they themselves offered it at the first meeting. I wrote to Paul that I did not need bad service for cheap. I need an excellent service for decent money, and offered to renegotiate the contract at the market price, but with fines for failure to meet deadlines.

Peter led the assistant, we will call him Nikolai. Like, Nikolai will perform less complex technical tasks. We didn’t see Peter in our office anymore, Nikolai has served us for more than half a year. He comes once a week and does what he does.
All that he does is limited by his personal professionalism and the desire to solve problems (to put it bluntly, not particularly deep, let's say he cannot cope with transferring the history of Skype messages from an old computer to a new one, although the answer is googling in a minute). He doesn’t call any other specialists on complex or special issues (obviously, there are no more professional professionals in the company, there is only a Jack of all trades Peter, who is always busy). If he is difficult to cope with some task (or simply the soul does not really belong to her), he postpones it for later. This “later” sometimes lasts for many months ... When Nikolai is ill, nobody serves us. That is, the office accepts the task, and sometimes even tries to do something, but without much success. Basically, they ask clarifying questions and transfer tasks to each other until she comes back to Nikolai.

A separate song is a personal manager. A few months ago, Pavel appointed us a manager, let's call him Michael. Formally, his job is to ensure that tasks are completed on time. And so that tasks are distributed according to specialization among employees. In reality, Mikhail understands not too much in IT, and the manager of it is frankly very weak. He was two hours late for my first meeting. I called to say that it was delayed an hour after the "beginning" of the meeting. I would have thrown such a “manager” out of my company after a week of probation.
As a result, management looks like this. I see that it’s already two weeks since the deadline for fulfilling an important task for me has been disrupted (for example, to buy, assemble and pump a computer for a new employee. The employee sits at my laptop for the third week). I look at their tax manager (they gave me a limited service entrance there), I also see five other tasks for which the deadline was disrupted. I call or write about all these tasks to Paul. Paul makes round eyes, and promises to immediately "insert all p ... dy." An hour later, Michael calls me back, and tells me something like “the task was so difficult, and it’s not really burning, but you need Peter to solve it, but he is very, very busy, the accident with other clients . And for other tasks, they say it was issued to Nikolay, so that he worked faster ”. On the next visit, Nikolai comes up to me, and asks why I complain to the authorities about the poor service, I know that he was sick last week and could not come, that I was mocking something ...

I will give the most vivid examples from the practice over the past year. I do not embellish anything, I write exactly the way it was.

• My employee writes me: “I asked the Windows to rearrange 32 bits to 64 bits half a year ago! My computer is 8 GB of RAM, which are not available to me, I have three-dimensional slows down! Why do I get fucked up, if I rent a job at least a day later, you can't do such a simple thing for me? Do I have to rearrange everything myself? ”Unfortunately for me and the shame of support, it’s true, I don’t have anything to say to the employee. A separate question on horseradish support bought 8 GB of RAM for the machine and then delivered 32 bits.
• I set the task of failure in their task manager - that their task manager does not send me email alerts about new task comments. No reaction. I inform Paul about this. He promises to sort it out. Two weeks later, they find out that no alerts come to anyone at all (!), And only after a week did they fix the problem.
• I (for three months) asked to make my home file server as quiet as possible (it is compiled and pumped by them, it’s being maintained by them). They reassembled it in a new, large building ... And it became twice as loud. I could not stand it and I personally resolved the issue in one evening.
• Another great example. We have a web system. There is a script for dumping the database of this system (backup, backup). I set a task manager in taksemedzhera: throw this script into the Windows system scheduler, so that it automatically starts every week. After that I spent three months running this script myself every day with my hands. The task hung with a red overdue inscription. I have several times talked about this issue to Paul by e-mail and in conversations. This is despite the fact that at that time the “manager” Mikhail was already working ... As a result, I just caught Nikolai in my office and insistently asked to do it. It took him two minutes.
• Finally, a funny fakap. I asked to add a strip of RAM to my computer. This has been done ... for more than 9 months! At the end, it turned out that their employee could not find this bar “somewhere”, and it was embarrassing to admit it, and he invented various excuses, that she was “beaten”, that she was “tested under warranty”. I gave the money back to a new one, after a week I finally got my bar. If you collect all the time I spent on reminders on this issue - in the end it would be faster to go to Oldie myself, buy a bar and stick it in the mother myself. And I would not have to pay 2 times :)

Summary

• My employees never call or write to the support office. They tried and know - it is absolutely useless. When we have a sysadmin, they go to him. When it is not - to me. I dream that the solution of each of the sysadmin questions does not pass through me personally.
• In reality, one person works with us all the same. The quality of work is determined only by his professionalism. But he receives money not from me, but from his boss. As a result, he listens to my wishes through one thing, and the commitment to our tasks and concerns remains at a very modest level. In addition, I do not control exactly who this person will be. At any moment it can be removed, fired, replaced. And he will leave (along with my passwords).
• Routine maintenance for the last year has not been done even once , although I regularly remind about it. The dust from the server is not cleaned, the errors on the disks are not checked. I finish the place on the backup disks myself.
• A year and a half ago, I asked for an inventory of our computer hardware, to make a network diagram. You will laugh, but this is not done, although I remind about it on average once a month.
• I insisted on regular automatic multistage data backup. TK on backup, too, I was.
• Now I (for a year now!) Are trying to get us to have a backup working machine assembled to replace one of the working computers in case of a breakdown. The same with my request to buy (for our money, of course) a spare network card, a switch and a router.
• All my office equipment is servicing ... my manager. The intercom does not work well, and support them reluctantly. I asked to prepare a proposal on the device of an inexpensive video surveillance system - a year I am waiting for some answer.
• New IT industry to optimize business processes? When I say that there is an idea to implement something like the brand “Dropbox”, the sysadmin groans and laments something like “God, another problem on my head”.
  I read Habr, I am interested in new products, they are not. We use Mecaplan and Asana for tax management, they are the kayako version of five years ago, according to which the search in the text of tasks is not working. I use KeePass for storing passwords, they are a notepad (paper one with a pencil).

As a result, it turns out that I (I am not at all an expert in the IT industry, I just have little experience and some narrow-minded understanding in this topic) will solve some IT tasks on my own easier and faster than contacting a team of specialists serving me. But I just do not want to deal with these tasks! I want to solve the problems of my business at work and, if possible, not to be distracted at all at all by computer problems, I have enough other administrative concerns. I want to transfer these tasks to the outsourcer and forget about them . I also want to hope that if something is wrong with my computer systems, I will find out about it from a sysadmin who performed the scheduled maintenance, and not after the failure of any file server. And in case of a file server failure (or any other responsible system), a reserve was prepared in advance, which can be put into operation in 15 minutes. Well, ideally, I want a sysadmin to come to me some day and say, “I found a new, cool solution for your corporate email. Here, read the article on Habré.

Tell me, can there still exist more other outsourcing system administrators? Maybe you are served better than me? Maybe people love their work and make it so that even a demanding customer is satisfied? If yes, I would appreciate a recommendation. I just have at hand a couple of IT tasks for my business that require an elegant solution, you could use them as test items for potential administrators.

Although I do not lose hope "to wash these." I wrote a new service contract from scratch with them, where I clearly stated all the conditions. Pavel was pleasantly surprised, thanked for a job well done, it inspired him - he sat down to write the maintenance rules

[UPD] Added. Lost relevance, Absorbed [UPD4]

[UPD2] More added.
Honestly, I did not expect such a heated discussion. I am asked a lot of questions (including in PM), I want to answer a couple of them here.
“Name this company, we want to know!”. This is a post of anger, not an objective and cooperative report. I let off steam. It will be wrong for me to name the company and the names of the participants in it. In my history I tried not to embellish, and to tell about what really was, but this is a post of anger! I took part of the experience of cooperation - the worst experience and talk about it. There is still a part of normally or tolerably done work, and there is still some part perfectly, on time, qualitatively or free of charge (despite the fact that it is not included in the contract) of the work done. If someone still really wants to know the name of the company - ask in a personal, there is no secret in this, but then divide my emotions by three. It also helps to answer the question "how did you tolerate them." In life, not everything is so terrible, as in this story.

In the end, I am pleased that I wrote this post. Sysadmins, I hope, it was interesting to look at the "boiling client". I received dozens of hundreds of various offers from large and small outsourcers, system administrators, freelancers, remote system administrators, students.
Under public pressure :) I realized that the “support” is probably worth changing.

[UPD3] Tender. Lost relevance, Absorbed [UPD4]

[UPD4] Tender. An assignment has been sent.
To everyone (including letters that failed in spam) who sent me a request for mail or in a personal, I sent a link to a “closed” document, which describes in detail: our equipment, services that need to be serviced, service requests and test tasks, form submitting an offer. If suddenly you sent a request, and did not receive a link to this document, write to me again.

Separately, I thank those who shared in the comments (or in personal letters) experience and offered concrete ways on how to find an adequate way to maintain computer systems for my company.