IT Support contract costs

[gjames59]

hi all,

 

Not necessarily the right place to ask as it seems most on here are part of an in-house IT team.

However long story short, nearby schools (2 primaries and a small secondary) have approached essentially saying we want you to run our entire IT ops.

I've been tasked with the question of how much do we charge them?

Was wondering if anyone could provide me with any insight if they have been quoted by commercial IT support contractors or what they charge their primaries? Obviously in this instance we're talking a small secondary school as well as primaries.

Any ideas greatly appreciated.

[GrumbleDook]

You need to base it on realistic expectations of the support you will provide.

 

Look at the systems the schools have, and chat with the SLT in each school to see what the want to have in the future too.

Analyse it on the basis of the following.

 

The hourly rate of your staff will already have certain costs built into it, so check with your school what you will and won't be passing on to the new schools.

Presuming that a rigorous and agreed maintenance regime is in place to allow for proactive work then assume a ratio of 60:40 proactive to reactive/requested work.

How many hours will the proactive work take on a monthly basis? (work it out over a month as salaries, etc will be monthly and a number of proactive jobs will only be done on a monthly rota).

You may want to band some of the work so that lower level items is completed by more junior staff, but more complex work (requiring more skills, experience, education know-how, etc) will obviously cost more.

Add the relevant percentage of reactive/requested work you then have the total number of hours it will take to look after things (the ration is a finger int eh air job ... and you may find that your own school has a different ratio. It is usually different between primary and secondary as well. Use of support desk stats will help you in this)

Then look at whether this requires on site staff to do the work and how much can be done remotely.

Add in a percentage to contribute towards CPD for staff, any expected travel costs (never a good idea to try to add on travel claims) and any other on costs the school will incur (insurance, support infrastructure, etc).

 

Once you have done this you may end up with a figure that is out of their reach and so the school might decide to lower the cost to get the business ... often as part of looking to pick up schools into multi-academy trusts.

 

If you need to, separately cost big items of work. If you are going to move the schools over to a network based around SCCM because it will save more work further down the line then break it down for them so they can see the cost before and after moving to a more efficient method of managing things. Also consider giving them a price list for set items, such as room builds, hands-on support during INSET, etc. Things you should *never* itemise though will include preparing workstation images, documentation, patching, etc. If you give people the opportunity to choose whether or not to buy the 'proactive' areas then they *will* cut corners.

 

You also need to consider whether there are existing staff in place and whether you are expected to take them on / manage them.

 

A few things (not a complete list) to consider as you look at this.

[synaesthesia]

Great points there - I'd like to add a couple of things to factor in; once you can get an idea of how much you are typically expected to charge (taking into account all of the above) you may also need to add in or at least take into account some other extras depending on what they already have on site. For instance if they run an RM network, you'll either need the school to have the relevant contracts in place with RM and/or you'll need a contract with them yourself (unfortunately I'm not sure on the specifics of this, we did similar for a couple of RM schools a few years ago but things have since changed)

 

It appears quite a few schools run RM kit and have absolutely no support contracts in place, so they're not entitled to updates.

[witch]

@gjames59

 

We have a support company who charge £1000 a year for telephone support and a 2hr visit once a month. If we wanted more visits it would cost more. Any other work costs £45 an hour.

[gjames59]

Thank you all. Some very detailed responses so thank you for taking the time answer my question @witch - Gauging the level of support they offer, do they cover everything or specific "high priority" devices with the telephone support?

[witch]

They cover everything on the phone - that's why we have them - another avenue for me apart from edugeek and google!

They can remote into the server if they need to. If they cannot fix an issue it will wait till the visit or we will have to pay for an extra visit (we do get a free 2 hours per year to add to any one visit)

As I (generally) know what I am doing they don't do a huge amount but are always there if I need them