CoreMind : Services : Engaging CoreMind

Engaging CoreMind

Goals

We have a tried and tested process geared towards ensuring:

  • value creation
    We work with businesses where we can add value
  • understanding
    we work to understand enough about your business to make the right recommendations, and give you enough opportunity to understand our business and model to make the right decision about managing your IT
  • open communication
    We strive to be clear in our intentions and expectations so there are no surprises or "hard sells"
  • price certainty
    You know what you're getting and how much it will cost, both now and in the future
  • no obligation
    You are in control of the process and able to stop or postpone any time you feel our service is not right for you

Process

The process we follow (which you're free to stop at any time) is:

  1. Initial Requirements Meeting
    We meet you in person to discuss your requirements for IT. We take a brief tour of your offices to determine your current level of Infrastructure. We provide specific advice as to whether CoreMind's service model is appropriate to your business.
  2. Tailored IT Infrastructure Management Plan
    We take the information you gave us in step 1 and devise a custom IT Infrastructure Management plan for your business. We work out the gap between where your Infrastructure is and where it needs to be to support your business objectives. We provide you with a fixed price quote to bridge the gap and a single monthly fee to support it thereafter. This monthly fee includes hardware, maintenance, advice and support.
  3. Follow-Up Meeting
    We present our findings above to you in person, stepping through each item to check the assumptions we've made are correct and that our recommendations add value to your business. We leave you with a copy of our report to examine in detail.
  4. Revisions Process
    As we learn more about your business and you learn more about our services, we may need to repeat the above process a few times to make sure the IT Management model we present to your business is just right.
  5. Contract Negotiation
    We have a standard service contract and much to our lawyer's disdain, we wrote as much of it as we could in plain English so everybody can understand it. Of course, we understand a "one size fits all" approach isn't always appropriate, so we're happy to customise something for your unique needs.
  6. Migration Plan
    After agreeing to proceed with our service, we work on a detailed migration plan, focussing heavily on Risk Management and providing as much value up-front as we can.
  7. Staff Introduction
    Before we start changing your technology systems, we talk to the people who make them work first! We introduce ourselves, explain what we're on about and how what we're doing will affect your staff over the short and longer-term. We encourage your staff to contact us with any questions they may ha
  8. Service Commencement
    Once we've signed the paperwork, developed a detailed migration plan and introduced ourselves, it's down to work! This usually starts with a phased Infrastructure Improvement Plan over a number of weeks or months (depending on the size of your organisation) to bring your core systems up to speed
  9. Periodic Reporting
    We provide you with a monthly report outlining the improvements we've made to your systems and the support we've provided to your staff. If there are any issues we think you need to know about or make a decision on, we'll let you know. Otherwise, you can leave the dirty work to us!
  10. Regular Service Review
    We don't just sell you a contract and then go on holidays. We expect to be held accountable and continually prove our value. We meet with you regularly for focused service reviews. In these sessions, we discuss on-going strategy, share recent developments in the Industry that may be applicable to your business and provide an opportunity for any adjustments that may need to be made to our service delivery. Of course we're open to these sort of changes at any stage, but we find a regular (every 3-12 months, depending on the size of the business) scheduled session helps everybody prepare and focus on looking forward.
  11. Value-Add Services
    Our first goal is to provide you with reliable, maintained and supported IT Infrastructure. Once you're at a level where everything's working smoothly, we work with you to identify other areas where IT systems and processes can be used to add strategic or operational value to your business. We believe having the right IT Infrastructure management and service model in place is essential before doing this: the more reliance you place on centralised IT resources, the better they need to be managed. This is what CoreMind does best.

Questions?

Q: Do you provide casual support?

A: We prefer not to. Our service model provides price certainty, scalability, flexibility, Service Level coverage and is delivered in a way that allows us to ensure the solutions we're implementing are the right long-term solutions for your business. That's very difficult if not impossible to achieve with a casual support arranagement. We'd prefer to pass you on to other providers with different business models than deliver a less-than-exceptional service. As an added bonus, this approach also helps us keep our costs down - providing high-quality casual support is more expensive than you'd think!