Your IT Department

How Your IT Assessment Works

Many IT companies offer a FREE (it’s always FREE in capitals!) IT Assessment, or audit, or consultation. Few, if any, explain what that actually means. We are going to try! Firstly, a disclaimer. This is what we do. Other companies will have different approaches and use different tools.

What The IT Assessment is All About

You!

We meet, either face-to-face, or video call in order to find out about you. This will cover some technical elements but it’s mainly about what your business does, how it does it and how your technology helps or hinders you.

In fact, the term ‘IT assessment’ is probably a little bit grand, it’s more like a structured conversation.

Setting it up

Your Account Manager will hop on a 15-minute video call with you (you can book yours at the bottom of the page). You’ll cover some basics, set a time for the meeting and decide how it’s going to take place. Face-to-face is best but video calls work great too.

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The Account Manager you speak to on your call will be the one that comes out for the assessment. They’ll be your Account Manager throughout the process. We don’t like to chop and change!

Preparing for the IT Assessment

You can prepare for the assessment by 1) reading this page (so great start!) and 2) thinking about the following questions:

If we could wave a magic wand and solve the 3 most frustrating things in your business with technology what would those things be?

If you’ve worked with outsourced IT Support before what did you love about working with them, and what did you not like so much?

What are the 3 biggest issues with your IT systems at the moment?

What’s happening now…

There will be a reason you’re looking to change, or start using, outsourced IT support. We’ll try to get to the bottom of why that is. Most of the time it’s not about your current IT firm not fixing things. The vast majority of people in our industry get that basic right. You might find them difficult to get hold of, or slow in responding but they will fix stuff.

What many are not doing is preventing problems in the first place. The have a ‘deal with what’s directly in front of us’ attitude and don’t help you plan ahead. When things need replacing it seems to come as a total shock to them!

If you’ve not got support in place, you’ll be looking for someone to simply take that entire headache away from you!

We’re obviously going to ask about your IT systems…

The focus is you and your business. But we’re going to be looking after your technology, so we do need to spend some time finding out about it.

We’ll ask you about your computers, laptops, printers, servers etc. It’s helpful if you know how many you’ve got, what version of Windows you’re using, how old they are. Pretty basic information.

But don’t worry if you really know nothing about those things. If we are on site, we’ll have a look around and identify what you’ve got. If we’re on a Video call, we may be able to install a small piece of software that can gather the information that we need.

The key is we are not going to need massive amounts of detail at this stage. There is not going to be a lot of technical talk, it’s not a technical conversation.

Are you feeling secure?

We are going to touch on security. Again, it’s not going to get technical, but we want to understand what you’ve currently got in place to protect your business.

If you don’t know we’ll do the work to find out.

And that’s it!

The conversation should take 60-90 minutes. Your Account Manager will then put together a report and arrange a time and date to talk you through the findings.

The follow-up

Your report has a simple traffic light system so you can easily see what issues have been identified and where improvements can be made.

We’ll then explain how we’d solve those issues and make those improvements.

If you like what we are offering, and the price that we can offer it at, then you’ll become a Your IT client and we’ll move forward to the hassle free IT takeover.

Booking Your IT Assessment

As we said earlier it all starts with a simple 15 minute call. You can complete a contact form, email us on info@your-itdepartment.co.uk or call us 0115 8220200.