When an IT service isn’t what you thought you bought

This organisation operated from a large, old and rather rambling building, hosting events as well as providing serviced offices to other organisations. Reliable WiFi wasn't a nice-to-have, it was an essential part of what they provided.

They had recently moved to a new IT support company which provided their WiFi, desktop computers and Microsoft 365.

But things weren't going well.

They were paying significantly more than they'd expected. The WiFi was better than the system it had replaced, but still didn't cover the whole building. And staff were struggling with the new computers they'd been given.

Not only that, but they were worried about the one clause in the contract that they understood all too well: the one that said they needed to give 12 months' notice of contract termination. And that date was rapidly approaching.

But the real problem was that what they had ended up with wasn't what they thought they'd signed up for.

What had they actually bought?

I went along to talk through the problems they were having and, importantly, to look at both the original sales proposal and the contract they'd subsequently signed.

There were significant differences between the two.

One of the biggest surprises concerned their computers.

They thought they'd bought replacement PCs. What they'd actually been given were thin clients. Instead of their data being held on their own computers and backed up elsewhere, everything was being held on the IT company's servers.

Every last byte of it.

That concerned me enormously.

Having an IT company manage your backups can be an excellent idea. But there is a very big difference between entrusting a supplier with a backup of your data and putting that supplier in control of the only copy.

The organisation had effectively handed over one of its most important assets without understanding that it had done so.

The proposal and the contract told different stories

There was another problem.

The sales proposal contained promises about what the IT company would provide that weren't reflected in its normal service package or in the contract.

With the organisation's permission, I spoke directly to the supplier to try to understand what had happened.

They acknowledged that their salesperson had promised things he wasn't authorised to offer. He had lasted only around three months with the company and had subsequently been dismissed.

Unfortunately, although the supplier accepted that there was a problem with what had been sold, they weren't prepared to change the terms of the contract.

At that point we'd moved beyond an IT disagreement and into a contractual one.

I'm not a lawyer, so rather than trying to advise the organisation on its legal position, I found a solicitor who specialised in contract disputes and referred that part of the problem to him.

Working out what they actually needed

Meanwhile, there was still an IT problem to solve.

So we went back to basics.

I sat down with the organisation and separated what they needed from what they wanted.

They needed reliable WiFi throughout a difficult building. They needed computers their staff could actually use. They needed Microsoft 365. They needed appropriate IT support. They needed control of their own data.

And they needed all of that within a budget they could afford.

Once we'd established that, I looked for an alternative supplier.

I found an IT company with a long track record of working with similar organisations, including those operating from large, awkward older buildings. They were also prepared to find pragmatic ways of working within the available budget, including supplying good-quality refurbished PCs rather than insisting everything had to be new.

At the same time, I worked with the existing supplier on a small project to bring the organisation's data back under its own control.

The lesson

There wasn't one single thing that had gone wrong here.

There was a gap between the sales proposal and the contract. There were services that didn't meet the organisation's actual needs. There was a significant risk around control of its data. And there was a supplier relationship that had broken down.

The organisation didn't need to become experts in WiFi, thin clients, Microsoft 365, contracts or IT infrastructure.

They needed somebody on their side who could work out what they'd bought, identify the risks, challenge the supplier, bring in specialist legal advice when the problem crossed into that territory, and help them work out what they actually needed instead.