productivity

Around the world, the new year is a time for celebration. It’s a time to reflect and a time we typically resolve to make the most of coming 12 months. We do this by leaving last year’s problems precisely where they belong, in the past year.

Many manage to adopt this approach in their personal lives, but it pays enormous dividends to apply it to our businesses too.

Cleaning up open issues from previous years gives you and your team free reign to make the next year a record-breaking success with nothing to hold you back. Intermittent IT problems, network slowdowns, printing issues, and unavailable resources can all be left in the past.

Starting the year off with a clean IT slate simply leaves you to handle the business areas which you do best.

Set Your Network Straight

If your only relationship with IT last year involved calls to fix broken systems then it is time to have your IT fixed up for good. Break-fix relationships can add stress to both your company and your IT provider.

While getting up and running fast and fixing breaks to get back on track is a clear priority, more can be done to ensure breaks don’t happen and downtime is avoided. Repeated break-fix call outs waste large amounts of time to troubleshoot, diagnose, and patch an unfamiliar system every time it has an issue.

Using IT to set you up right means using knowledge and experience gained over time to right the ship and keep the whole system working together.

The same experience configuring your network top to bottom can be called on again to update or change it as requirements and projects shift. With a complete system picture, less time can be spent on troubleshooting, and more can be allocated to just getting work done.

Sports Car IT

IT with long-standing issues and bugs, ones that staff have gotten accustomed to working around, can be like running an old vehicle. It’s often more expensive to maintain an old car than purchase something more modern requiring less maintenance. An old car requires more parts, becomes less efficient, uses more oil, and is more likely to suffer breakdowns too. The same is true of old IT.

The cost over time of a well-configured system can often be the same or even less than fixing broken issues on the old one. The difference is a dramatic difference in downtime and lost productivity. Better IT means getting where you need to be, faster.

Your Staff Deserve IT

Nothing distracts employees from a task more than unexpected downtime or systems failures. Whether getting crucial documents Friday afternoon, or attempting to settle into work Monday morning; bad IT is frustrating, disheartening, and time-consuming.

One of the hardest but most rewarding elements to cultivate in a company is good staff morale. When you have it, productivity goes up, turnover goes down, and the business environment is vastly improved for everyone. When you don’t have it, the workday is that much tougher for everyone.

Workflow issues are well known to be one of the top contributors to poor morale. Slow machines, unavailable printing, and interruptions cause more knock-on issues than just the IT department can fix. Good employees need and deserve the right tools for the job.

A Better Way to Operate

Use the new year as a golden opportunity for a fresh start on your IT. An assessment of your system by IT professionals will diagnose issues and give you a complete guide to get back on track. Whether caused by a configuration error, bad devices, or something else; we’ll track down the causes and leave them to be forgotten about.

There’s never a better time to establish a managed IT services relationship. Contracting professional services can put an end to system bottlenecks, configure your system right, and advise on the best course to take into the new year.

The most important decision you can take into the year ahead is to stop addressing IT issues as they happen. Take charge of your IT and fix the underlying causes holding you up.

Give us a call today at (515)422-1995 to start a service relationship that will see your business take off into a very happy new year.

There are few things as frustrating as IT issues getting in the way of your work. Even the simplest of problems can break your flow, ruin your productivity, and waste your time. IT should be working to boost your day instead of slowing you down.

Tripping up on a computer glitch can happen at any moment. Working to fix one can take hours. You might try a few steps that have worked before, ask a colleague for help, or try a web search to see what turns up. All of these take time from you or your colleagues, and often make the original problem worse.

When you outsource your help desk, your IT problems become our IT problems. We take charge of righting the ship to keep your tech on the right track.

Setting Up Your Business for Success

Many businesses try a break/fix model to deal with IT issues. This means waiting for problems to happen before contacting IT to resolve them. Break/fix adds costs and downtime to every IT issue as they happen. To us, this makes it an unacceptable long-term solution for business.

The process of scheduling a mutually suitable time to visit, diagnosing the issue, and resolving every issue on a case-by-case basis is massively time-consuming. Both IT technicians and in-house staff waste productive hours dealing with, often trivial, problems.

We think that time could be better spent building your business instead.

Your Personal Help Desk

When you outsource your IT help desk, you get a custom service dedicated to resolving your issues fast. Technicians with the knowledge and experience of years in IT can work without creating new problems or making the original issue worse. In modern IT, knowledge and experience is the key to successful solutions.

Many of the issues we resolve on a day-to-day basis are problems we have seen many times before on many different systems. IT is our business, and we know it very well.

How Outsourced IT Works For You

Outsourcing your IT means simply submitting a ticket to have issues taken care of. Having your own help desk to rely on means having help available exactly when you need it. Waiting on a local firm, or nearby technician to become available should be a thing of the past.

Queueing for an ‘advisor’, waiting on hold, and spelling out your problem over and over again is no fun for anyone. There should be better ways your time can be spent. There are certainly many ways firms can benefit more from ours.

Submitting an electronic ticket to resolve your issue is an easy, one step, process. Detail the problem once, email the ticket, and you can return to your work. We’ll call you back to work on a solution when the timing best works for you.

Managing Problems Remotely

To resolve system issues, diagnose, update, or maintain systems, we often log in remotely and take ownership of the problem personally. We’ve found there is little advantage to wasting time asking staff to find menus, click on links, and tell us what they see. We get straight to the heart of the problem and fix it there and then.

Problems that tie up one or more machines for a long time can be scheduled for out-of-hours, holiday, or weekend fixes. Large, system-wide updates or upgrades can be done remotely when they won’t get in the way.

For staff, updates appear to happen without anyone around to see them. You would be forgiven for thinking the IT is fixing itself.

Our golden rule is to make sure IT works for you, not the other way round. If you are wasting staff hours on hold, arranging meetings just for your tech, or structuring your day around simple problem solving, your firm could be upgraded in a flash.

Call us at (515)422-1995 or just submit a ticket and we’ll sort out the rest.

Make IT Problems Last Year’s Problems

Remote IT Will Create Tech That Works for You

VISIT US