Outsourcing IT management: the questions that make quotes comparable
Three offers side by side and three different numbers tells you nothing until you know what is inside each number. This is the list we would want to be sent, written by a party that answers it, which is reason enough to read it critically.
Most of the difference between quotes is not in the price but in what falls outside it. Settle what you are asking for first, and only then who you ask.
Four things decide whether offers are comparable: how many workstations, what you keep yourself, which hours are covered, and what has to happen once before it runs.
Always ask about the exit. A supplier who will not put leaving in writing is counting on leaving being hard.
What to settle before you ask
A request without these four produces offers you cannot lay side by side, and then the party that kept the most out of scope wins.
- How many workstations, and how alike they are. The count sets the number; the number of variants sets the work. Six exceptions across a hundred workstations is a different contract from a hundred identical ones.
- What you keep yourself. Purchasing decisions, who gets which rights, which software may run. Anyone who does not settle that up front finds out afterwards that it went along.
- Which hours are covered. Office hours, evenings, weekend, night. This is the largest cost lever and the most quietly assumed.
- What is going wrong now. Not "it is not running smoothly", but: how many tickets a month, about what, and what has come back three times. Without that, every supplier writes the same standard story.
This does not need to be a thirty-page document. One page with these four is enough to make offers comparable, and it saves an intake conversation with every party that would otherwise cover the same ground.
The questions that make the difference
These eight separate an offer you can hold someone to from an offer that reads well. The third column is what a thin answer looks like.
| Question | Why | Thin answer |
|---|---|---|
| Who picks up, and where do they sit? | Decides whether you reach a person or a queue | "Our team is here for you" |
| From what moment does the response time run? | Four hours from the report is not four hours from triage | A number with no measuring point |
| What falls outside the monthly fee? | This is where the real price difference sits | "Custom work on request" |
| What is one-off and what is monthly? | Catch-up work does not belong in the subscription for years | One figure with no breakdown |
| Who owns the licences? | Decides whether you take them with you | "We arrange that for you" |
| What reporting do I get, how often? | Without reporting you learn something only during an outage | "Available on request" |
| What happens if we leave? | The exit sets your negotiating position for the whole term | No answer, or only a notice period |
| Name three things you do not do | A party that says yes to everything has not understood the question | "We take care of everything" |
The last one is the most useful and is almost never asked. Every supplier has limits; the only question is whether you hear them before you sign or after.
Where offers diverge without showing it
Two quotes at the same figure can differ by a factor of two in what you actually get. Four places where that happens:
- The coverage. Management during the day and monitoring at night are different services. If it says only "24/7" without saying what happens at night (watching, or also fixing) that is a word and not an arrangement.
- The catch-up work. An environment that is not standardised yet has to become so first. Inside the monthly fee, you pay for it for years; stated separately, you can see what it is.
- The assumptions about numbers. A per-workstation figure at a hundred is a different figure at a hundred and fifty. Ask what happens on growth and on shrinkage; the second is rarely in there.
- What happens to your data. Where the logging sits, for how long, and whether you take it with you. This is also the question an auditor asks, so you need the answer anyway.
What we would answer, and what we do not do
We are one of the parties you would send this list to, and that colours this article. Read it as the questions we find answerable, and hold us to a concrete answer just as hard.
What we attach to it: our own people on the service desk rather than a hand-off, one way of working across multiple sites, and reporting a board reads without translation. We hold ISO 9001 and ISO/IEC 27001; that says something about how we work and nothing about the outcome of your selection.
What we do not do: we do not run tenders and we are not a procurement adviser. We do not draw up your requirements, we do not assess other parties' offers and we do not sit on the side of the table that makes the choice. Nor could we: we are one of the bidders. If you want that guidance, take a party that is not competing.
Questions we get about this
The four that come back most often.
Do we have to run a formal tender?
Only if you are a contracting authority: government, or an organisation buying with public money above the threshold amounts. If you are an ordinary company you are under no obligation, and "tender" here is a figure of speech: you ask a few parties for an offer. That saves months, and the questions that make the difference are the same either way.
How many parties should we ask?
Three is enough and five is too many. With three you can hold every conversation properly and actually read every offer; with five it becomes a table of numbers and precisely the part where the difference sits disappears. Better to ask three parties well than five superficially.
Should our current supplier take part?
Usually yes, and not out of politeness: they alone know what is really there, and their offer shows what they have not been proposing all this time. Do make sure they get the same request as the rest. An incumbent answering questions nobody else received wins a comparison that was not one.
Can you write our request or assess the offers?
No. We are one of the parties you are asking, and those two roles do not belong with the same party, whoever writes the requirements writes them towards their own strengths. We do not run tenders and we do not assess other parties’ offers. What we do is answer your questions, including the awkward ones, and say what we do not do.
Further reading
What this connects to.
Shall we answer this list?
Send the request as it stands, even unfinished. We will answer what is in it, say which question we would add, and where we are not the right party.
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