Some I.T. Professional Business Pearls

Here are some thoughts on the many aspects of running an I.T. business in today’s world that have been garnered over my 13 years in business so far.

• Never reveal business operations
• Financial
• Client’s names (don’t ever reveal clients supported to others)
• Projects, Purchases, or other such products and services WE provide
• Never volunteer _any_ information
• Always keep scheduling information time related
• I’m running behind, I’ll call in 15
• I’m working on something that went sideways, let’s delay to tomorrow please
• Always call, text, reach out in-person versus e-mail
• If calling follow-up with an e-mail “thanks for allowing us to delay by a day” or some such note
• We keep a priority band that our clients are aware of
• Priority 1: Business Critical Outage
• Priority 2: User down or problematic app
• Priority 3: App updates, changes and such
• Priority 4: All of the other stuff
• Never, ever, give a customer poop for leaving
• I learned this one the hard way
• Business is business no matter how the termination was handled by the now former client
• Never, ever, take things personally
• Respect their decision and acquiesce with grace and integrity
• Be silent
• Resist the urge to be defensive - shut this one right down
• Cooperate with the next I.T. company if need be
• Give over the keys to the kingdom with ease
• Always, and everywhere, do everything in writing
• “Yes, Ms. Customer, I’d be more than happy to help you do X and it’ll be done on Y” via e-mail after a conversation
• Always confirm project add-ons and scope creep with an e-mail indicating back charges and extras as they fall out of scope
• Keep an extensive set of audit notes for each client
• Keep an extensive change log for all clients
• Snip everything, name them accordingly, and keep them forever
• Be disciplined and document everything
• Use a time keeper
• Outlook Tasks or CRM with due dates and reminders
• OneNote notebook with Surface 4/Pro and pen close at hand
• Note keeper pocket notebook and mechanical pencils
• Write all requests down and transfer what needs to be to Outlook or CRM

The above is the culmination of my 13 years running our I.T. company. I hope it helps! :)

Philip Elder
Microsoft Cluster MVP
MPECS Inc.
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

The “Right” Client and Our Business

Fellow MVP Cris Hanna pointed to the following article:

•  Inc.com: 8 Customers You Should Avoid

It took us almost 5 years to be able to start being choosy about the work we took on and the client relationships we wanted to build.

In that first five years we had to learn _a lot_ of lessons from the school of hard knocks.

Everything from a long standing and ongoing client not paying for work they signed off on to folks that expected a whole lot of work for no pay.

Then there was the scope creep on big projects where the original job, say a migration, then included a bunch of Line of Business application upgrades and migrations . . . and were not in the original proposal/agreement but, “since you’re already here . . . “

One of the more difficult lessons was in communication. That is communicating with the client about ongoing scheduling, jobs, and other task needs.

A really bad habit to break is to _not_ communicate with a client we have an appointment with that we are running late or even that we may need to reschedule.

In this day and age where we are facing pressures from all sides to cut and run we need to be extra mindful of the one gem in the rough we have in SMB: The face-to-face contact and relationship with our client contacts.

• Be a man, or woman, of our word.
• Need to make a change? Communicate first.
• Use the tools at hand.
• Outlook calendar invites, ticketing system if you use it, and keep lots of notes!
• Phone is best. Texting seems to be a close second.
• Be legit, stay legit, and deal with folks that operate above board.
• This is especially true for software licensing.
• Be personable.
• When on-site reach out, say hello to everyone, and especially ask them how their day and tech are doing!
• Operate on principle.
• Create a project scope and a set of terms & conditions.
• Stand by them.
• Add-on charge _everything_ not included in the original scope.

Having an established set of terms & conditions is one thing.

Abiding by them and following through on them are two _very_ important aspects of the business relationship. By doing so, we place the expectation ball in the prospect’s/client’s court of being honest and forthright in their communications and negotiations with us and ours with them.

By not following through on our commitments, and holding them to theirs, we place ourselves in a very awkward position where precedent gets set that the prospect/”client” may indeed be free to take advantage of us.

This is a very dangerous precedent to set.

The same is true for time spent on _any_ client related need. Any and all time must be billed for and tracked with a full set of notes. But, most importantly, the client _must_ approve that work in writing ahead of time.

Yes, on-the-fly this may be difficult to be had, but again this is where communication abilities come in to play.

An e-mail simply stating that we hit a snag and that extra time will be needed can be fired off from a Smart Phone in a matter of seconds. If the contact approves of it verbally confirm that by e-mailing them back with a “Thanks for your approval” note.

Keep a paper trail. Keep an e-mail trail. Keep all documentation and notes related to any and every project small or large. Get a scanner that can do scan to PDF with OCR so that any font text can be read into that PDF and be searchable later on.

Scan all handwritten content in and set it into a client’s folder called NOTEs or ticketing system.

In the end if a question about what we have done ever comes up then we have something to fall back on including any and all communication with the client/contact.

We also use SNIP in Windows to take snippets of all of the situations we are working with.

In the end keeping the above approach to running our IT business protects both our clients and us.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

Chef de partie in the SMBKitchen
Find out more at
www.thirdtier.net/enterprise-solutions-for-small-business/

Windows Live Writer

Fonality–Setting up Windows Server/SBS DHCP After the Fact

We ran the SBS 2011 install via Answer File for this new network setup that we are working on.

They already had a peer to peer setup in place with SonicWall devices serving DHCP and acting as edge.

Two Fonality servers were set up in redundant mode.

So, prior to running the SBS OS install we deleted the SonicWall DHCP subnet scope to make sure we had SBS based DHCP this morning.

Well, no go.

We had the SBS is Installed Successfully green check mark but no system had an IP address.

Checking in the SBS Native Tools console we saw that DHCP had no scope.

We ran the Internet Address Wizard and:

The SBS wizard found a DHCP server at the Fonality’s primary server IP. We logged into the admin site with no DHCP Server options anywhere to be found.

In the end we needed to call them to have them log in via their own backend management and turn the DHCP services off for both the primary and secondary servers.

Moral of the story: If there are any third party devices and/or services in place before, or coming in afterwards, verify with the vendors whether anything in them will conflict with a Windows Domain/DNS/DHCP setup and have their “This is how you set things up on a Windows Domain/DNS/DHCP based network” documentation at hand.

The Fonality and other systems on this particular network require DHCP scope options along with custom DNS Forwarders for the phone “domain” among other things.

Got coffee? ;)

UPDATE: Fonality’s Support Site for DHCP and DNS setup on a Windows Network

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*Our original iMac was stolen (previous blog post). We now have a new MacBook Pro courtesy of Vlad Mazek, owner of OWN.

Windows Live Writer

A Perfect Cup of Coffee Every Time

As mentioned in our Thanksgiving post we are pregnant with our fourth child. One of the adventures with each pregnancy has been the various cravings that Monique will have.

One of my favourite cravings was during our first pregnancy’s second trimester. We had Monique’s pancakes, whipped cream, maple syrup, and all of the fixings _every day_ for close to four months. I gained quite a few “sympathetic” pounds during that period! ;)

Lately, one of Monique’s cravings has been for a cup of coffee in the morning. Monique was normally a tea drinker up till then. Since we generally made coffee with a stove top percolator to “cook” the coffee grinds to our preferred strength, we needed a coffee maker that would make a decent single cup of coffee on short order.

We looked at a number of coffee makers that used a pre-packaged cup or disk with the coffee grounds in it. After evaluating the various machines we ended up purchasing a Cuisinart Keurig Single Server Brewing System (SS-700C) (Canadian product site).

We chose the Cuisinart model because it has the ability to use an included My K-Cup Reusable Coffee Filter which meant that we were not locked into purchasing the pre-packaged coffee cups. This feature was critical because we absolutely love Tim Hortons coffee with a close second for Starbuck’s Verona or Sumatra blends.

So, after working through the various water volumes (8oz, 10oz, and 12oz) and coffee grind scoops we have managed to come up with a near perfect cup of coffee every time:

• Keurig Settings
• Water Temp: 194 Degrees Fahrenheit
• Default cup size: 8oz
• Tim Hortons Fine Grind
• 2.5 scoops of coffee.
• 8oz water setting.
• Add the required cream and sugar to taste (or black).
• Starbucks Sumatra and Verona Espresso Grind (ultra-fine)
• 2 scoops of coffee
• 10oz water setting
• Add the required cream and sugar to taste (or black).

When we purchased the bag of Starbuck’s coffee the Keurig was new so we did not know what grind level would be best. When it comes time to replace the Starbuck’s coffee will will step back the grind setting so that the grind is not so fine.

We only use osmotic water for our coffee.

IT Professionalism

So, what does brewing a perfect cup of coffee have to do with our own IT business?

Drinking a lot of coffee to figure out the needed coffee to water configuration brought us to the point where we could _document_ the required process to make that coffee _every time_ a cup of coffee was required. Thus, our “client”, Monique, was able to enjoy her morning coffee consistently.

Not only do we need to take the time to work out the best process for configuring our IT Solutions, but we also need to take the time to consult with our fellow IT professionals to see if there are ways that we can improve our IT processes and/or IT Solutions.

In the end, when it comes to implementing an IT Solution we must have the right documentation in place, checklists to guide us through the set up procedures, and key vendor representatives on-call to help us out if we get into a pinch.

These processes are an absolute must to providing our clients with a Professional long term trouble free IT Solution.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*Our original iMac was stolen (previous blog post). We now have a new MacBook Pro courtesy of Vlad Mazek, owner of OWN.

Windows Live Writer

IMS – Cluster NIC Setup Worksheet Available

There are a lot of places that we need to pull little bits of information from when preparing to build a cluster on the Intel Modular Server.

When it comes to NIC configuration there are _a lot_ of steps to walk through in order to team them and subsequently configure the needed VLANs on each team.

• NIC MAC Addresses
• Needed to identify the individual NICs.
• Example:
• MAC addresses will be 00-15-17-AA-00-01 and 00-15-17-AA-00-02 for on board pair.
• MAC addresses will be 00-15-17-EC-99-01 and 00-15-17-EC-99-01 for the mezzanine based pair (mezzanine comes with sticker).
• NIC Index found by running command: prosetcl adapter_enumerate
• Blog Post: Intel PROSet Adapter Teaming In Server Core and Hyper-V Server 2008 R2
• Blog Post: NIC Binding Order On Server Core or Hyper-V Server 2008 RTM/R2
• NIC GUIDs are required.
• Blog Label: Intel PROSet
• Intel NIC based blog posts.

We have placed a basic worksheet on our Web site that can be downloaded.

Please feel free to use this worksheet as a template for your IMS documentation.

• MPECS Inc: IMS Cluster Worksheet download page

The SAS WWM Initiator IDs are required for configuring a Promise VTrak E-Class RAID storage unit with the IMS based cluster.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*Our original iMac was stolen (previous blog post). We now have a new MacBook Pro courtesy of Vlad Mazek, owner of OWN.

Windows Live Writer