Microsoft Consulting Best Practices
Progent’s team of Microsoft and Cisco Premier consultants average longer than ten years of real-world professional background, in the trenches of IT service, performing a wide range of technical tasks for a large array of customers. Each Progent support professional shares a refined set of leading practices which are incorporated into company-wide best practices training that Progent teaches its consulting staff. This ensures that you get not only expert technical capability, but also a consultant with proven approaches for applying technical knowledge to repair actual network problems quickly.

Key features and benefits of Progent's best practices include:

  • Individual Experts
    Progent’s team of IT consultants is made up of some the most experienced Microsoft and Cisco experts in the industry. Averaging more than 10 years of real-world experience per consultant, Progent's Microsoft Premier experts offer a tested set of methodologies for solving network problems, planning projects, and delivering consulting services. The technical depth of Progent's support staff allows Progent to provide your business a consulting expert with tested ability and an efficient technique for delivering quick and inexpensive IT solutions.

  • Problem Escalation Through Teamwork
    When required, Progent utilizes a group approach to solving the most difficult technical issues. By leveraging hundreds of person-years of experience from Progent's Microsoft and Cisco Certified professionals, Progent can rapidly and efficiently solve even the most vexing issues. Consulting with hundreds of customers and performing thousands of sophisticated implementation and integration jobs annually gives Progent a special view on which approaches work and which ones do not. Complex software compatibility issues are a minefield for even the most talented consultants unless they bring a long and diverse background in real-world experience with a wide range of technologies.

  • Company-wide Standards for Best Practices
    Progent has incorporated the aggregate background of its top engineering personnel to develop an in-house, corporate-wide set of best practices designed to promote fast, cost-effective solutions of information technology issues and to measure and maximize client satisfaction. These practices include a powerful focus on client communication and services documentation. Progent's Founder and CEO, Les Kent, has a 35-year track record of successful network consulting, business management, sales and marketing, and operations. Progent's company-wide best practices are strongly influenced by Mr. Kent's experiences creating complex technical solutions while working as a system architect, software developer, task manager, implementation expert and diagnostic engineer.

  • Ongoing Training
    As an authorized partner with Microsoft and Cisco, Progent makes sure that staff engineers undergo continued technical and best-practices education that contains important lessons and procedures for new product adoption that have been gleaned from the experience of thousands of technical professionals around the world. This promotes continually more efficient delivery of services to Progent's customers.

  • Internal Database of Problems and Proven Solutions
    Progent's highly evolved service reporting system provides detailed documentation for all delivered services. Every Progent team member has full availability of the details of services provided by any consultant to every client. This record of issues and solutions, as well as false alarms and missteps, is arranged as readily accessible in-house database that enables Progent's consultants to communicate their knowledge company-wide to ensure that the overall efficiency of Progent's consulting services grows over time. This database also eliminates your reliance on an individual consultant by making it possible for one Progent consultant to pick up where another left off while saving time spent getting ramped up on your network setup. An additional advantage of Progent's support reporting system is that your company can more smoothly handle IT management duties in house if it becomes cost-effective to do so, or you can migrate to a different consulting company if you grow unhappy with Progent's service.

  • Microsoft Solutions Framework Project Methodology
    For major projects, Progent consultants follow the Microsoft Solutions Framework model for delivering service. Microsoft Solutions Framework divides projects into discrete and manageable components that minimize the risk of a project falling out of control. Each step creates a solid foundation for the success of later phases. Planning and integration issues are defined early in the project continuum so problems can be anticipated and resolved before client workflow is disrupted. In addition, this prevents expenses from skyrocketing due to unforeseen problems during large scale roll outs. All phases are recorded to build a comprehensive description of consulting services delivered and to assist in ongoing network support.

  • Access to External Support Databases
    As authorized consulting partners of Microsoft and Cisco, Progent has the benefit of the industry's most extensive information technology databases and resource pool. Some of the most powerful technical databases accessible by Progent's engineers are the operational leading practices incorporated into the assorted Management Packs published by Microsoft and third parties for use with Microsoft System Center Operations Manager, the automated server monitoring platform that is the basis of Progent's IT outsourcing and network monitoring packages. Management Packs consist of custom built processing rules that can respond to events, performance margins, and warnings tracked by Microsoft System Center Operations Manager. Management Packs can also give expert advice on how to deal with specific issues by programmatically finding appropriate articles from the extensive Microsoft Knowledge Base.
For detailed information about Progent's network support packages, refer to Progent's IT Support Outsourcing and Network Monitoring Fact Sheets, available in Adobe Acrobat format for convenient printing.

For an example of how Microsoft Operations Manager helped a business achieve enterprise-class network management, read the Microsoft Operations Manager Case Study.

To contact Progent about consulting services for your small business network, call 1-800-993-9400 or visit Contact Progent.

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