As someone who operates a business, your responsibilities only seem to grow with time. Who knew that you would have to be an accountant, legal expert, marketing guru, and technology whizz, all at the same time?

It’s clear that you need specialized resources to deal with the specialized challenges that face every business, and IT is certainly no exception. In order to provide and maintain good technology for your business, you might consider outsourcing some of the responsibilities.

This usually falls to a managed IT services provider, and those services can help you provide expert support to your business. As you contemplate this option, there’s a common question that comes up. How long does it take to get a managed IT provider up and running?

It’s a fair question, and it’s best answered by a thorough look at managed IT onboarding.

What Is Onboarding?

When you contract a managed IT provider, there is a period of time that exists between agreeing to a contract and receiving the services promised. That lag time is known as onboarding.

It’s a period where your service provider takes necessary steps to prepare for and facilitate the transition of IT responsibilities. That transition might exist between your existing in-house IT resources and the new service provider. You might be switching service providers. You might be adding a service provider to your existing resources.

In any of those cases, it’s important for the new provider to take measure of how things currently work, formulate a plan for the transition, acquire any necessary resources to execute the transition, and then begin the work. All of that, together, is the process of onboarding.

How Long Does It Take?

The amount of time needed for onboarding depends on many factors. Your current hardware and software can impact the process. Who is currently running your IT and how that is expected to change will certainly be a factor.

Overall, Acropolis quotes 30 days for onboarding. With this much time, we can carefully go through an exhaustive process that prepares both parties for the coming changes, and it allows us to fully live up to the expectations we set before any contracts were signed.

What Happens During Onboarding?

For some businesses, 30 days is a reasonable amount of time, and it feels natural. For others, 30 days go by quickly, and you might not feel ready for such a fast transition. Yet other businesses are in dire need of IT help right away. For them, 30 days can feel like an eternity.

We always strive to match the needs of our clients. If you have exceptional circumstances, we’ll do everything we can to accommodate you. Despite that, we do quote a standard onboarding time of 30 days.

To better understand why onboarding takes 30 days, you can take a quick tour of the overall onboarding process. Naturally, there are minute details that won’t be included in this list, but this is a general overview of what you can expect. The good news is that you have access to IT expertise throughout the onboarding process.

Engagement Period

Arguably, this is the most important part of onboarding. During the engagement period, we’re going to talk to department heads and decision-makers throughout the company. The goal is to understand the whole business and get a feel for what each segment really wants and needs from the new IT services.

The engagement period informs everything else. A smooth IT transition depends on this communication, and we will not hold back here. We’ll seek out as many useful conversations as possible until we’re confident that we have a working knowledge of what the business needs and what is expected.

Discovery

Discovery is kind of like engagement, but in this part, we talk to your technology systems. This is where we take stock of what hardware you have, how your software is accessed, and the overall infrastructure running your technology.

You can think of discovery as an IT audit for the company. Our goal is to fully understand what you have and how it works. We’re also looking for telltale signs of problems. If we see aging systems, signs of failure, security holes, or anything else that needs to be addressed, we’ll make a list, with priorities, so that we can hit the ground running.

Strategy

Strategy flows naturally from engagement and discovery. In those two processes, we learn. In the strategy process, we apply the lessons. Strategy should always be customized around a business — both how it exists today and how it plans to change in the future.

With a working knowledge of how the business utilizes technology and how those technology resources are currently deployed, we can partner with business leaders to flesh out the finer details of your IT strategy.

High-level strategy was discussed before you committed to your new managed IT provider, but specific details can only be ironed out when we get a closer look at everything and learn more about the business.

Acquisition

Engagement, discovery, and strategy are a bit nebulous. It’s very difficult to say exactly how long those stages will take for any business. It depends on many things.

When they are done, though, the next step is obvious. We have to start acquiring the necessary resources in order to implement our IT services. That might mean ordering hardware that we are due to replace or upgrade. It could involve sourcing software that you want us to install.

There are a lot of different ways this takes form, but ultimately, we need enough time to acquire these resources so that we can deliver all promises on time.

Typically, acquisition is one of the more predictable components of the onboarding process, but that won’t always be the case. In times of rampant supply chain disruption, unpredictability is simply a new normal. That’s another reason why we quote 30 days. We need wiggle room to make adjustments and overcome unexpected supply delays.

Distribution

Distribution is something that happens during and after onboarding, and it’s incredibly case-sensitive. In some cases, radical changes are not scheduled to take place early in the managed IT transition. That would mean that we don’t need to distribute large quantities of new technology assets before the scheduled start day.

In other cases, the transition is planned around major upgrades or updates. We might plan to bring assets into place ahead of the 30-day period. Naturally, this is something that will be discussed during strategic planning. It’s important to understand that the scope of planned changes is what dictates the timing for distributing new technology resources. If we need to deliver items early to keep to schedule, you can trust that it’s what we will do.

Solving Problems With Managed IT Services

You can see that the Acropolis method is to plan carefully and live up to every promise we make. We want to provide reliable, trustworthy IT services to businesses in need, and we are committed to doing this in a way that is informative and painless for our clients.

If you need a managed IT services provider, you should contact us today. The Acropolis Technology Group is ready to help, and that starts with a simple conversation. We’ll be happy to discuss options, make recommendations, answer questions, and otherwise help you understand what is available and what it might do for you.