How Managed Services Onboarding Ensures Success

When delivering our managed technical services, the beginning is a critical time. It sets clients and consultants up for success, enabling consistent service and maximizing productivity. Let’s take a closer look at how Sikich performs onboarding for managed services.

Standardized process with predictable outcomes

A well-planned, complete onboarding process is essential when a managed services provider begins a new engagement. Without it, it’s not possible to support your business effectively. When we talk about onboarding new managed services clients at Sikich, we mean a standardized, structured approach. Specifically, our approach has two steps:

• Sikich managed services are based upon a 360-degree view of your IT environment. We gather comprehensive information on the technologies and business processes that we are going to support. From there we record this standardized documentation in a well-proven system that makes it easy to find important details.
• We deploy our software agents on workstations and servers. Aside from keeping an eye on your servers and network for potential problems, this enables us to use our tools to accomplish a wide range of tasks we may perform for you. This includes everything from patching to backup configuration and monitoring to anti-virus management to keeping a detailed, always current inventory of your assets under management.

One important, primary outcome of onboarding is that our support and network operations teams gain all the knowledge they require to do their job. At the end of a managed services onboarding, we can work on your behalf as effectively as your own IT department would from the first day of services. At that point, we are also in a position to advocate for your business interests with third-party support providers, such as line-of-business software and hardware vendors.

When we go live, thanks to the onboarding we performed, we can respond to problems and requests quickly and efficiently. When we set up new computers or user accounts, or take care of other, everyday tasks, we keep these steps predictable, repeatable, and transparent. We use process and configuration templates that incorporate our decades of expertise in working with many different businesses to standardize and simplify account and hardware setups or configure software applications.

What does onboarding entail?

The complete inventory of your network and computing operations we create during onboarding includes, among other items:

• Standardized documentation with diagrams of the network environment;
• Documentation of server and client computer specifications;
• Account passwords for all systems and equipment;
• Business location addresses and detailed employee contact lists for each;
• Important processes such as quote approval, employee termination, or approval of security changes;
• Business-specific details, for example, office hours for each location or which production computers must not be restarted during working hours;
• Instructions for emergency responses, so we know whom to contact if, for instance, a server fails during off-hours; and
• Third-party details regarding support for line-of-business applications, hardware warranties, and ISP accounts.

Your managed services contract includes Sikich onboarding. It takes place in the weeks immediately before a go-live date for our services. Onboarding usually takes between two and four weeks, depending on the size and complexity of your technology environment. As we get close to going live, our team meets with your employees in person or in a conference call to make them comfortable with the transition and explain how they will access our services.

If you have questions or would like to discuss onboarding or any other aspect of our Sikich Tech 360 managed services, please get in touch with us. Feel free to visit our Managed Services page as well.