When you’re planning to change your IT provider, you’re going to have a lot of questions about the process. What does it look like? How painful will it be?
A question we get a lot is, what do we need from the client for a great service migration?
The answer is that we don’t actually need a lot from you. We consider onboarding as part of the services we offer, and we aim to make the migration as painless as possible.
That said, we will need to learn a whole lot about your business in order to provide excellent IT support, and to gain that information, we’ll ask you about the things listed below.
This is where the bulk of the information is found. Once you commit to Acropolis, there will be a transition from your current MSP to us. We call that process onboarding, and while it’s happening, we’ll be working long hours to learn everything we need about your business and your systems in order to provide a smooth transition.
Most of that learning happens with direct communication with your outgoing MSP. Presumably, they currently have all of the accounts, passwords, and technical information needed to provide IT support to you.
We’re going to build a document (we call it the Run Book) that holds all of this information. The good news is that you don’t have to help us build it. We’ll take care of the whole process by partnering with your existing MSP to make sure we have all the critical information.
All we really need from you in this part of onboarding is access to your outgoing MSP. Tell us who they are. We might ask for a phone number. We take it from there.
This, more than anything else, is how we can ensure a smooth transition.
While we’re creating the run book and figuring out how to quarterback the migration to our services, we’ll want to have a conversation with some of your organization’s leaders. We have some crucial questions that really help us with our strategic planning, but they might not be as technical as you expect.
Here are some of the questions we like to ask new clients, early during onboarding, so that we can provide a better transition:
They are simple questions that often have big answers, and we’re really trying to accomplish two things.
First, we want to make sure that we provide the service you expect from us. That’s why we’ll ask about what appealed to you when you chose us, and it’s why we’ll ask about your previous provider. In many cases, clients choose Acropolis because they simply outgrew the resources of a previous provider. It helps us to know that.
The second thing we want to do is plan around your business plans. If you have acquisitions, new lines of business applications, vendor needs, or anything else that is likely to change about the organization as we migrate services, it helps us to know that. We’ll account for the changes so that onboarding remains painless and so that our services will be more than adequate once the transition is complete.
We will end up with a lot of staff information when we build the run book, but there are some specific details we’ll want to get directly from you.
For starters, how large is your staff? An exact number can help us a lot.
On top of that, we’ll talk to you about priority accounts, key players, and major stakeholders. Basically, who in your organization needs some extra attention from Acropolis during the migration? Once we know who those people are, we’ll give them that attention to make sure everything is in good shape.
A few other questions are likely to come up, and one that we can never overlook is in regard to remote users. Do you have people who work remotely? How many? What kind of work are they doing.
We’ll be able to see how you manage remote work when we build the run book, but we need a clear picture of how much remote work support you want so that we can build around those needs.
For the most part, we’re discussing the migration from one MSP to another (in this case, Acropolis is the other). But, even businesses that have an MSP often have a little bit of in-house IT support too.
Maybe you have a single IT expert who stays on staff to help liaise with your MSPs and make sure things are up to par. Maybe you have a whole team, and you just bolster their services with your MSP. Or, you might not have an IT expert at all. Instead, you just have that one person who ends up taking responsibility for a lot of IT issues.
Regardless of how in-house IT looks at your organization, we want to pair up with your in-house personnel. They can provide some of the most valuable information that aids us during onboarding. On top of that, we want to ensure that our migration process is making their lives easier and not harder.
All of that requires direct communication, so we’ll ask you who we should be talking to.
Lastly, we need access to your IT systems. Again, we’ll mostly get that from the run book. It will have information that allows us to create accounts, log in, and take a direct look at everything.
We bring this up so that you understand that even early in the onboarding process, we intend to work directly with your IT systems.
In the beginning, we’re going to be running a discovery audit. This allows us to see exactly what IT assets you have, exactly how they are deployed, and exactly what we will need to do to work with them seamlessly.
The need for this is pretty self-evident, but we don’t want it to come as a surprise that we’re going to create IT accounts and take a deep look at your IT systems. It’s essential to the process.