The Practice of IT Services

IT support as a practice and not a fire drill

Late in 2006 we started laying the groundwork for a complete overhaul of our IT support practice. We had long grown tired of the reactive “break/fix” model that has dominated our industry and which has provided little in the way of long-term value for our clients. Rather than constantly battling IT-related fires, we began looking [...]

Building a better (network documentation) mousetrap

We’ve been looking for a better solution for creating and maintaining documentation for our clients’ networks for quite some time.
We currently rely on a Microsoft Word template I picked up and customized back when I started X-BAR. Word works o.k. for this purpose-it provides a flexible container for storing lots of different types of information, prints [...]

Billable rate calculator

A few years back I was struggling to understand why my company was barely breaking even (and in some cases losing money). One of the things that I did to better understand the financial mechanisms at play in my business was to develop an Excel spreadsheet that I could use to calculate an employee’s billable [...]