When working with the right IT company in the DC Metro Area, there’s a clear, time-tested, methodical process that makes any transition process painless.
When working with the right IT company in the DC Metro Area, there’s a clear, time-tested, methodical process that makes any transition process painless. And there will be benefits to switching if done correctly —The transition process gives you the opportunity to correct all the IT problems from the past, and with the right IT provider switching will be painless.
Once you’ve made your decision to switch and transition to a new IT company, you and your staff will want to know what’s going to happen. What will be involved? Will there be any problems? Will you have to participate in any way? etc… We explain the transition process below.
We start with…
A Full Briefing For Your Leadership – This is a meeting with the president or CEO of your company explaining what the transition will look like. Our team will install a transition agent on each user’s computer that works seamlessly in the background and won’t disrupt their workflow.
A Full Briefing For Your Staff – We brief your entire staff and explain what we’ll be doing, how the transition agent works and what they can expect. Most of the time, IT companies will ask your employees to email in their IT issues, and they respond in a certain period of time. We do things differently, and provide an immediate response to questions and concerns.
We ensure that your teams know that our transition agent won’t monitor what they’re doing. Instead, it monitors what the computer is doing for them and checks to see if the computer is performing correctly. Plus, we won’t ever remote into a user’s computer without their explicit consent.
Here’s what the transition looks like…
We begin by installing a transition agent on all of your computers. This gives us the ability to perform scans and network probes to gather the information we need for the transition.
We’ll work behind the scenes, and as long as we don’t have to replace any equipment, there won’t be any downtime. If your previous IT provider owned your hardware (such as your firewall), then we will have to replace this for you. We make every effort to keep your staff working while we transition you to your new service.
But you say…”Won’t we need to do something? Won’t we have to gather all the IP numbers for our phones and computers for you? etc…
No, you won’t. With our transition agent, we’ll do an audit and gather this information automatically. The agent presents this information to us in the format we need for a smooth and seamless transition.
Once we gather this information, it goes into our Data Collection System that you will have always have real-time access to. Now you’ll have an up-to-date reporting on all the hardware and inventory on your network.
At this point, we’ll now have all the credentials we need for the transition: DNS, Website, VoIP and more that you probably don’t even know you have. This may include credentials that you handed over to a previous IT provider who doesn’t even know they have them or may not be willing to give them up.
We’ll contact them in order to get all the passwords we need to move forward. Then we put this information into our documentation system where you’ll always have full access to them. You’ll know where all of your credentials are and what passwords you have. You’ll have all the information that you should have had before the transition.
Some ask…”Will the old IT company be able to get into our network?” Absolutely not. We find out how they are currently accessing your network and block this. If they placed a tool to remotely monitor your network we immediately remove it from every computer. Plus, we place a firewall on your network to prevent any unauthorized access.
Some worry…”Is the old IT company going to be hostile about removing them, or are they going to be easy to work with?” The answer to this is that we get both. If they’re hostile, we remove them discretely and don’t let them know that you’re transitioning to our service until everything has been put in place. Then we notify them that they’ve been replaced. Hopefully, they’ll work with us, but if not, you don’t have to worry. We’ll take care of everything.
A complete audit is conducted, and we provide you with an IT Roadmap. All of this takes about two weeks to do where we collect the Good, Bad, Ugly and Great of your IT system. These are the things we see that need to be monitored or corrected, and the first 30-day action items for us to accomplish to get your IT system normalized.
From here we develop your Quarterly Roadmap and Annual Roadmap which we document with you. This becomes the Outline for what we will be doing and your IT Goals. With this Outline, we’ll all be on the same page working to accomplish your business goals with the right IT solutions and services.
With our business model, your team will always get an “Instant Response.” We guarantee a 9-second response time by having your employees call us instead of emailing. This way your users will have easy access to tech support all the time.
We provide each user with a tech support number to call if they are having any issues. When we install the transition agent on your users’ computers, we post a sticky note that says “If you have tech support questions call us” with the appropriate phone number.
We can even program your phones with a speed dial to the tech support number. We make it easy and fast for your users to get support. Plus, we’ll demo how this works on a large screen to show them how the call hits our system and how quickly we respond so they can see it first-hand how critical response times are to us.
When switching to NOVA Computer Solutions, you’ll have a transparent, time tested, methodical process that makes the transition process painless. Plus, you’ll get a lot of information that you didn’t have before. You’ll have a complete real-time inventory of all your IT solutions, credentials and passwords, you’ll know if your backups are working. You’ll have all the details that a previous company wasn’t offering. Keep watching this space for Part 2 of this series where we’ll tell you more.
In the meantime, stay up to date on what you need to know about business technology today. Visit The NOVA BLOG.
