High Quality

Our IT is outsourced to a company who has a reputation for really bad service on their contracts. It is so bad that Sears dropped them, and actually saved money in the process. Anyway, we have had nothing but problems with them. For example, the closest technician that they have to 'service' our contract is over 4 hours away, in another state. While they do have an office locally, they say that they 'do not have anyone there assigned to our contract.' I find that very odd. How hard is it to tell a technician to bill their hours to another contract? As a consultant I did it every day, billing time to each client or contract individually as I worked.
Say you wanted to add a new hire to the users accounts, how long do you think that would take? As a network admin I can tell you that it should take no longer than 10 - 15 minutes. It takes this company over 2 weeks to add a new user. Say you forget your password to your email account or network login. You call the 'Help Desk', and after they tell you that they cannot reset your password, and give you a ticket number they hang up. Then a few weeks later, you get a phone call that they reset your password and closed the ticket. You tell them that you never received the new password and ask them to tell you it on the phone. "Oh we can't tell it to you over the phone. We emailed it to you." to which you respond "What? I do not have access to my email because I do not have the password!" and if they speak english the reply "We will have to get back to you on that."
We were 'transformed' by this company. Being 'transformed' was their word for, we take your brand new computers and give you 3 year old computers in its place. We took 5 steps backwards in being able to do our day to day work. I still have one of our 'old' workstations, because they cannot seem to get all of the programs to work on the 'new' workstations. So, I work on 2 different workstations for different programs.
I made the mistake of going on vacation for a week. When I got back I found that one of my network accounts was locked. So I went to a co-worker that has access to the same network and asked if he could unlock my account for me, his reply "Only if you can unlock mine first!" So, it took no less that 8 phone calls to different people at this IT company, none of them spoke anything but broken english, to get some one to understand my problem. I was told "We locked all of the accounts on the domain, because every one on that domain has been transformed." I had to explain to them that since they had not been able to 'transform' the database servers that we use to store all of our data on-site, that I needed access to that domain (with admin rights) to manage those servers. They told me that it was not possible. I then explained the they would have to explain to the President of my company why he could not collect money from our clients because we defaulted on our contract because our outsourced IT would not give us access to the data for the client. Shortly after that I got the admin rights to the domain.
I have more stories about these guys, but I will tell those another time.

When IT goes wrong... its never good.