But while professional help is always a wise move on a journey like this it can be very expensive to hire outside help to tell you WHAT to build and then more outside assistance to build it. With day rates for competent and experienced advisors, developers and architects easily running into several thousands of pounds, in addition to training costs to help your existing in-house team re-skill, it can be very costly.
Despite all that cost, you are still taking on the risk of getting all the moving parts working together in harmony to deliver on your goals. There are no guarantees that a few years later, and after an eye watering amount of money going out the door, you won’t have to scrap it all and start again. There is no shortage of examples of precisely this happening across all industries. But probably the biggest argument I can make against these approaches is that they are inefficient.
During my time as a Senior Professional Services Architect, I was drafted into all manner of businesses, from banks and insurance firms to catalogue retailers and even a tin can manufacturer. I can tell you I had no meaningful experience - other than being a customer - of any of these industries when I arrived on site. The mantra was always that we were platform and general process experts so we would learn from the customer’s domain experience to build whatever was required.
But that meant building the same or very similar configurations and customisations for each client from scratch. The end result was that the customer got what they needed through a highly bespoke implementation - and a very big bill to boot. They also then had the delightful liability of owning it all - complete with the risk - while I traveled off to the next client to borrow another watch.
With such experience, it’s easy to see how both Isaac Newton and Stephen Hawking - perhaps two of the greatest thinkers that ever lived - put much stock in the phrase “on the shoulders of giants.” The statement acknowledges that if we are to achieve advancement we will do far better if we start from a position of learning and borrowing from people who have come before us.
To build afresh each time misses an opportunity to build on the shoulders of others. So how can a transformation journey build on previous work? At POPX, we have experienced the journey ahead first hand and know what the tools and technology must do to create successful outcomes. For this reason, we have invested the time and resources in building and integrating the components that can deliver on this and provide them in such a way that allows for rapid adoption and risk mitigation.
If we assume a cloud vendor’s platform is typically around 50% ready to go out of the box for what you need, how long will it take to close the gap? At POPX we have engineered an MSP Platform that is close to 90% ready for what a service provider needs to transform their operations and become truly smart for the future. Closing that last 10% gap is then a considerably easier job than navigating the risks of building the majority from scratch.
Even better, for POPX clients we package this approach with a fully managed service so that all further integrations and enhancements are taken care of within a fixed fee. Meaning the risks are significantly reduced, as there are no contractual limitations or expensive surprises to continuing the transformation journey and evolving the service further.
We have developed an extensive number of platform enhancements that we consider to be our giant’s shoulders. From tight integration with leading monitoring systems, automated service reporting to a portal framework that will wow your customers, we have a big toolkit on which to accelerate your transformation and a willing team to be your partner for the journey.
Avoid the PS trap during transformation by working with a partner that will deliver 'everything' you need, no matter what lurks beneath.