What it means to be World Class
What does a World Class technology company look like? What does it mean to successfully deliver an IT project? Any project for that matter? We throw phrases around such as ‘flawless deployment’, ‘right first time’ and ‘zero downtime’ but what does it actually mean from a customer point of view, how do you pick the right IT supplier and know you’re paying for a success story?
Finding a World Class Technology Partner
Years ago, when IT solutions were new to organisations, they replaced paper based or ‘traditional’ processes. When introducing a new IT system you had the luxury of implementing things slowly, and replacing paper-based solutions over a period of time. We talked about ‘adoption’ and ‘trial periods’.
Today’s landscape is totally different, gone are the halcyon days of ‘greenfield’ sites. Today’s implementations go into dark, muddy and complex brownfield sites, full of unknowns and technical debt.
In order to successfully deliver a project today, you first need to assess the ‘As Is’. What is there, what does it connect to, can we replace like for like or do we also need to upgrade x,y and z at the same time? These complexities are compounded when organisations haven’t been strict about version control of software, and documenting everything they use.
It isn’t impossible – IT suppliers who understand such complexities are out there. Experts whose timelines and budgets take account of the unknowns and demonstrate an affinity with the dark art of planning. But how do you know who you can trust? Consider the old adage that ‘you get what you pay for’ – supplier cost is based on demand. Suppliers who are available at a low cost and no notice likely have time on their hands, and it may be wise to wonder why. Any company worth dealing with is likely to be priced competitively, but is unlikely to be the cheapest out there. They are likely to be in demand, so may be unable to perform an implementation the day after the request is made.
When suppliers bid for work, ask them all the question ‘What discovery time have you budgeted for?’ if the answer is none, steer clear, run a mile. Because you may be an IT Director and be confident that your own team has a great handle on what is there today, you may think zero discovery time is required. But you should never ask a supplier to come and implement something onto your estate without them doing due diligence themselves.
The Ortera Approach
The best suppliers will offer assessments for free. Ortera’s Standard offering includes a free assessment of what you have today. We go beyond that, if we’ve bid for a piece of work to implement ‘x’ and we find during that free assessment that you don’t need it, or that there’s a better solution we’ll tell you. For free.
Most won’t. Most will take your money and implement what you’ve asked for (or their appreciation of it), costs will increase because they’ll hit problems along the way with your existing tech, they’ll end up charging you for their lack of effort right at the start.
What does flawless look like?
If you manage to pick a great supplier, of course things can still go wrong, we all know and love IT, but sometimes things just don’t go your way. The key to a flawless delivery is a flawless end-user experience, not necessarily a delivery without any bumps in the road, as much as we’d all wish that to be the case every time. A flawless delivery is something that IT engineers across the world love.
Imagine this: your staff leave work at 5pm on Friday. They go home and relax, see friends, etc. Unseen by all, like Santa’s elves, the implementation team move in and by 6pm server backups are underway, new kit is being moved in, patched and built. Software is delivered and everything tested. By Sunday lunchtime the team go back to their hotel, unnoticed. Monday morning comes along, your staff return to their desks refreshed. Switch on, start work. Those implementation engineers that haven’t been home yet, get in super early for the early starters, and stick around for a few hours, in the background, just in case of issues. That’s flawless. IT that is invisible to your staff. If they’re talking about it, there’s something wrong with it – it’s slow, it doesn’t do what they need it to. Silence? It’s golden. Santa’s elves can finally go home to the North Pole.
No Parade
On a recent project, after four consecutive nights of implementing a really complex solution from 8pm-2am, I got home and fell straight to sleep on the sofa. But I was woken up by my phone buzzing, and a text message from our client’s IT Manager. My first thought was that there may be problems, we’d have to go back in. But when I opened it, it simply said ‘World class’. His users came in a few hours later, none the wiser, having no idea what we’d been doing stealthily out of hours all week.
So to be flawless is often to be invisible. To plan properly is to do things right first time. For staff to not know we’re nocturnal is to do things with zero downtime. That’s what it means to successfully deliver an IT project. And to do it with a smile on your face knowing your customer thinks you’re great? That’s what makes Ortera ‘World Class’. No fanfare, no fuss – most of the time the greatest accolade for a technology company is a new customer application or service arriving as if from nowhere, Everything just works – that’s the Ortera way.
The Ortera team strives to work differently to any other IT or consulting organisation. We offer a free assessment session, then provide options to ‘resolve’ which can be taken up by our customers at their leisure. We offer our clients the option of as much or as little support as they need, and never deploy a full project team at extortionate day rates! We are on tap to them for a fixed price whenever they need us, whether it’s for a project red team or a half hour support call. Our customers just keep coming back, because they can trust us to deliver on time, and right first time.
Award Winning
Don’t take our word for it – our customers have nominated us for several national awards, ranging from Education Software Innovation (2017 winner), to Best Technology Consultancy (2019 winner). The gongs are nice, but happy customers who keep on coming back are all we need to know we’re truly World Class.
What is the Big Deal about Ortera? Find out HERE. You can hear more about our World Class technology consultancy exploits by visiting us on Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter.
