Greycourt

Greycourt

“VIE has helped us improve our relationship with our IT managed services provider and our overall IT service levels. He has helped to keep projects on track and complete on time.”

Gretchen Shoup

COO

Greycourt engaged VIE to perform an IT organizational assessment and provide a part-time CIO to help solve critical business and IT issues. VIE recommendations and work has improved IT service levels substantially.

Situation

Greycourt, a financial investment firm, was dissatisfied with its IT services provider, and the relationship had become adversarial. IT outages were common, and resolutions were inadequate. Greycourt felt that the service was expensive and did not deliver the desired results.

Critical Issues

Specific issues reported included frequent network drops, poor desktop application performance, a fragmented remote desktop strategy including Citrix, Microsoft Windows Terminal Server, and VMWare View, lack of offline access to emails while traveling, and printing issues.

Solution

VIE was engaged to provide an initial assessment of the managed IT service and made recommendations to address the issues. A key element of the underlying problem was that Greycourt had outsourced its entire IT function to their managed IT provider. VIE provided a part-time CIO for about 1 day per week to act as Greycourt’s IT leader and work with the vendor on service levels and prioritize projects to address the issues. The VIE consultant formed a Greycourt IT Steering Committee to align priorities with business need and track progress on improvements.

VIE reviewed performance factors, especially for remote staff, and recommended network architecture changes, server configuration changes, and removal of network and storage devices that were no longer required. This reduced IT operation costs, and improved performance and vendor service levels. VIE worked with Greycourt executives to select a new vendor for on-going IT services and facilitated the contract negotiations and the transition over about 1 year.

Results

The number of Greycourt trouble tickets and service complaints dropped to an acceptable level of ‘typical’ IT support needs, and the number of business disruptions decreased significantly. Overall IT costs were reduced, and service levels improved. With Greycourt now having an IT management professional on the team without having to pay for a full-time hire, the Greycourt/IT vendor relationship became productive and proactive instead of adversarial and reactive. The new IT services vendor has brought a much higher level of service eliminating all of the basic performance issues in IT.