Onega Onsite Visits

As part of our service, we often incorporate regular planned onsite days for clients where we visit your office to an agreed schedule.

What happens on a planned onsite day?

We'll be with you for the day (or as agreed) and we aim to use our time as usefully as possible while we are onsite. We aim to strike a balance between being outgoing and friendly and getting the job done where need to concentrate on things. It is a great time to meet everyone and so that everyone can put faces to names. There is always work to do to improve IT and regular onsite focus can help make sure we are jointly on top of matters. 

Some of what do we do on an onsite day:

• Attending to pre-defined / planned work lists and asking colleagues onsite if they have any issues to attend to.
• Making sure your company IT is running as well as it can be.
• Ensuring that systems are running as well as they can be.
• Attending to smaller issues that might not be worth a ticket otherwise.
• Attending to batched tasks like planned moves and changes.
• Keeping 'on top' of IT.
• Staff (User) Training.
• Staff Security Awareness Training.
• Server health checks and maintenance.
• PC upgrades, installations and swaps.
• Documentation, procedures and policies (eg helping to update for GDPR).
• Deploying new features in systems so that your IT makes you as productive as possible.
• Backup Tests, BCP element tests. 
• Project work as appropriate.

How often should we attend site for planned visits?

We can attend for days or half days, and to a cycle that is reasonable and matching your organisational needs. There will be a natural balance and we can always vary this over time. For example in a new site there might be more to do which may well reduce over time as everything matures so we could reduce days.  Typically you will want to allow enough time to deal with the volume of regular issues / moves & changes that typically come up and also have a small reserve of hours for anything unplanned and 'moving thing on' / (proactive measures).

Engineer rotation:

We aim to ensure that an appropriate number of Onega engineers are familiar with each site, and thus we'll arrange a rotation which makes for a balance which ensures you see familiar faces but also that knowledge is shared and that systems are correctly documented. Benefit of multiple eyes and in case on of us engineers suffers the impact of a charging rhino or the proverbial London Double Decker Bus, then colleagues will be familiar and able to provide cover whilst (hopefully) recovery happens.  

With so much above listed - how do we prioritise and where do we start?

Good question. Like much of IT this comes down to common sense. We'll typically have a phone call with your company's main IT co-ordinator prior to visit or at the start of the visit so that we discuss what items are on everyone's lists and agree priorities of action so that tasks are co-ordinated logically to provide the greatest possible degree of benefit and working around your staff.

What is the cost of an onsite day?

A number of days may be included in your standard Onega Core IT Services Agreement, or may be charged separately at a standard engineering day rate for extra visits or where they are not inclusive in maintenance.

What are the benefits of regular onsite days?

Clients with whom we attend for regular monthly visits enjoy smoothly running IT systems and report greater staff satisfaction with IT services.

Thanks to  See-Ming Lee for the banner photo on this page via Flickr