Planning
IT Consulting & Advisory
Technology decisions made one emergency at a time add up to systems nobody designed. IT consulting is the step back, where we document what you have and work out with you what to fix first.
Signs Your Business Needs IT Consulting
Technology decisions get made under time pressure, so your systems grow by accident instead of by plan.
If any of these describe your business, this service is usually the right place to start.
- You're budgeting for next year and guessing at the technology line.
- You have a large quote in front of you and no way to judge it.
- Growth or an acquisition is about to change what your systems have to do.
- Nobody can say what you spend on technology in total.
Benefits of IT Consulting and Planning
- Technology spending stops arriving as a series of surprises.
- You know what's aging and roughly what replacing it will cost.
- Advice comes from someone who isn't trying to sell you hardware.
- Vendor decisions have a written comparison behind them.
Our Approach to IT Consulting
We document what you're running before recommending anything, because advice without that is guesswork. That includes contracts and renewal dates, which is often where the first savings turn up.
Then we put the gaps in order. Not everything is urgent, and treating it all as urgent spends money on the wrong things first. You get a sequence with the reasoning attached, so you can push back on it.
You end up with a plan you own, written so you can take it to your leadership team. We'll deliver it if you want us to, and the plan works just as well if your own people do.
What Our IT Consulting Services Include
A documented picture of what you run
Systems, licenses, contracts and renewal dates, written down and handed to you.
A budget you can plan against
What technology costs you now across every vendor, and what it's likely to cost over the next few years.
A prioritized roadmap
What to do first and what can wait, with the reasoning behind the order.
Single points of failure, named
The systems your business can't operate without, and what happens now if one of them stops.
Vendor and contract review
What you're paying for, including services you stopped using, and which contracts are up for renewal. Vendor management tracks those contracts year round.
A second opinion when you need one
An outside read on a large quote or proposal before you commit to it.
How an IT Assessment Works, Step by Step
- We assess what you have and what it costsSystems, contracts, licenses and renewal dates. The total yearly bill is often the most surprising page in the report. See IT assessments.
- We write down where the risk isWhat's out of support and what would hurt most if it stopped, ranked, with what each fix would take.
- We build a roadmap you can budget againstTwelve to eighteen months of what happens when, so replacements are planned costs. Our technology roadmaps page shows what goes in one.
- We review it with you as things changeThe roadmap gets revisited on a schedule, so it stays a working plan as your business changes.
Finding Savings in the Systems You Already Have
Before anyone proposes new systems, there's usually money sitting in the current ones: licenses still assigned to people who left, overlapping tools bought by different departments, circuits paid for at sites that closed, and manual steps that exist only because a process was never revisited after the software changed.
It's unglamorous work, and it often pays for the projects that follow it. Our post on what six IT vendors actually cost you shows where that money tends to sit.
For ongoing guidance at the leadership level, fractional CIO services keep the roadmap tied to business decisions. Our Q4 IT planning checklist is a good place to start on your own, and one case study shows a commercial lighting company that replaced six vendors with one partner and a twelve-month roadmap.
In their words
IT Consulting and Advisory FAQ
How is IT consulting priced?
Assessments and roadmap work are quoted as fixed pieces of work, so you know the figure before it starts and you own the document at the end.
For clients on a managed IT agreement, the review that keeps the roadmap current is included.
Do we have to become a managed client to get this?
No. Consulting work stands on its own, and plenty of it is done for businesses that keep their existing arrangements. If it leads somewhere else, that's a separate conversation and a separate decision.
Will you just recommend your own services?
The plan says what needs doing, and it doesn't assume we're the ones doing it. Where we're a sensible option, we'll say so and price it. Where your existing provider or your own team is the better answer, the plan says that.
How long does an IT assessment take?
For most businesses this size, a few weeks from start to a document you can act on. Most of that time goes into gathering what already exists, which is why keeping the documentation current afterwards pays off.
Ready to discuss IT Consulting today?
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If you'd rather not use the calendar, call 440.210.1362 and we'll set up a time with you.
Monday through Friday, 8:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. Eastern
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