What questions a potential new managed IT services company?

[Mook]

Seeing two prospective managed IT service providers to look after our office infrastructure (desktops, servers, network etc.). I've already had proposals from both.

What questions would you ask them if you were in my position? I already know enough about their businesses and financials etc.

[Rachel]

ITIL v3 compliance for their managed services - little things like change management, config mgmt, incident mgmt, problem mgmt, release mgmt, reporting, SLAs etc.

References (who else uses them and what do they think...)

Rate cards for business hours, out of business hours, project work as distinct from business as usual.

Outage response - how to flag it (SMS, phone call, pager?), proactive or reactive, time for response, time for on-site presence, time for resolution of issue.

Trusted advisory role - strategy and alignment, best practices (in both your industry and theirs), technology roadmap for the next 3 - 5 years, biases (are they a typical M$ shop, or know the best of all worlds including FOSS?), security vs. productivity etc.

Any of that help?

[Mook]

All on my list thanks Rachel

[Hopsta]

Tad random, but we've been asked on tenders recently to give a references of someone that used to use the software/service.

[Mook]

Nice one G - find out from someone who no longer uses them and why they don't. Cheers

[garcon magnifique]

If the company's from the north east and is run by some arrogant geordie fat cnut who claims he's a manc, run a f*cking mile.

[Tipex]

Re-response times, try and find out how quickly they can respond 'on site' rather than just over the phone, as ours have a 2 hour on site response, but they don't actually have anyone within 2 hours of any of our sites, 4 hours is the best they've ever managed.

[Mook]

They're 5 minutes away from us, which is one of the reasons I've decided to can our existing provider - they've moved an hour away, plus their service levels have gone through the floor since then and, despite my best efforts, they're not accepting this is a problem.

[Hopsta]

Things like staff retention and training programs, how do they keep their staff and update them with new tech.