I run an IT consulting firm and we do a lot of on site staffing for small and medium sized businesses that either don't have their own IT department, or are searching for ways to improve.
One of my clients is pretty opposed to spending time or money on any kind of preventative maintenance, really on anything that won't make him money directly. I had a 3 hour meeting with him yesterday about a number of issues that I wanted to correct (for instance adding a RAID array to their web servers for redundancy, implementing a disaster scenario plan, setting up backups for their servers and databases etc)
I also had a few suggestions that I thought would improve work flow (such as simplifying their order entry system so that the order only needs to be entered once, rather than 3 times) The meeting didn't go well. He didn't understand why we would want a backup system in place when "things have been working fine for 3 years without one" and also didn't understand why it would take so much time to migrate half of his current data from one server to another (long story, not really relevant, its a business decision that requires IT implementation)
I quoted him 2 weeks to implement, migrate and test the new server to which he replied "If I can go to dreamhost now and have a brand new site up in 5 minutes, why would it take you two weeks when all you have to do is copy files from one to the other? Can't you just select all and copy and paste?" So this went on for probably another 45 minutes with me trying to justify doing things right versus just making things work until we came to a semi- agreement...or so I thought.
Below is an email I received about an hour after our meeting - apparently this is all that he got out of it.
All,
Our IT consultant has pointed out several areas where we can improve efficiency and otherwise increase our productivity. We will all have to make changes over the coming weeks, one thing that I would like to implement that will save us all a little bit of time, is instead of typing out long answers over Jabber, try to use shorthand whenever possible, if its a yes or no question, answer with either y or n. I'll come up with more abreviations later. See me with questions.
<irrelevant information removed>
At first I thought it was a joke, or some sort of retort, but I haven't received a follow up email yet. This should be fun :roll:
One of my clients is pretty opposed to spending time or money on any kind of preventative maintenance, really on anything that won't make him money directly. I had a 3 hour meeting with him yesterday about a number of issues that I wanted to correct (for instance adding a RAID array to their web servers for redundancy, implementing a disaster scenario plan, setting up backups for their servers and databases etc)
I also had a few suggestions that I thought would improve work flow (such as simplifying their order entry system so that the order only needs to be entered once, rather than 3 times) The meeting didn't go well. He didn't understand why we would want a backup system in place when "things have been working fine for 3 years without one" and also didn't understand why it would take so much time to migrate half of his current data from one server to another (long story, not really relevant, its a business decision that requires IT implementation)
I quoted him 2 weeks to implement, migrate and test the new server to which he replied "If I can go to dreamhost now and have a brand new site up in 5 minutes, why would it take you two weeks when all you have to do is copy files from one to the other? Can't you just select all and copy and paste?" So this went on for probably another 45 minutes with me trying to justify doing things right versus just making things work until we came to a semi- agreement...or so I thought.
Below is an email I received about an hour after our meeting - apparently this is all that he got out of it.
All,
Our IT consultant has pointed out several areas where we can improve efficiency and otherwise increase our productivity. We will all have to make changes over the coming weeks, one thing that I would like to implement that will save us all a little bit of time, is instead of typing out long answers over Jabber, try to use shorthand whenever possible, if its a yes or no question, answer with either y or n. I'll come up with more abreviations later. See me with questions.
<irrelevant information removed>
At first I thought it was a joke, or some sort of retort, but I haven't received a follow up email yet. This should be fun :roll:
