Progent's Computer Consulting and Troubleshooting Services

White Paper: How Businesses Can Benefit by Outsourcing and Co-sourcing IT Services from Progent
Section 7 of 9

Part-time CIO Services and Project Management
Progent can provide the services of a veteran IT professional with decades of experience in technology management, development, operations management, and business consulting for organizations ranging from Big 4 firms to dot-com startups to state government agencies. These senior consultants can provide key services for small business or enterprise clients.

Progent's Part-time CIO Services for Small Businesses
Most small businesses cannot afford to maintain an experienced full-time CIO with the big-picture perspective needed to align IT spending with strategic goals. To help clients leverage their IT investment, Progent offers part-time CIO services for assistance with:

• Strategic Planning: Create and implement a comprehensive growth strategy that leverages technology to help a company become a high-performance business.
• Rationalizing and Managing IT Budgets: Create models for Total Cost of Ownership, Return on Investment, and Risk Management and define a realistic IT budget.
• Business Process Improvement and Reengineering: Analyze current workflows and use information technology to maximize performance and achieve business goals faster.
• Contract and Vendor Negotiations: Qualify vendors, products, and services; negotiate contracts; and monitor SLAs and special upgrade opportunities.
• IT Security: Define a security and compliance strategy that addresses policies and procedures, IT infrastructure security, network monitoring, and emergency response plans.
• Data Center Management: Set up and manage a data center or colocation site, automate administration, and establish software update and backup/restore processes.
• Network Management: Design and manage an affordable network infrastructure that offers performance, speed, availability, security.
• Desktop Management: Develop plans for change management, Help Desk services, asset tracking, software revision control, configuration standards, and mobile support.

• Requirements Definition: Define how a project will deliver value, establish its structure, develop pilot plans and testing strategies, and address deployment implications, operations management, and acceptance criteria.
• Design and Architecture Proposals: Create functional specifications, master project plan, and risk management plan. Analyze documentation and training requirements and finalize work plans, cost estimates, and schedules.
• Pilots: Set up pilot systems to reduce engineering risk and business disruption by thoroughly testing new infrastructure prior to deployment. Set up proof-of-concept tests for enterprise deployments of key technologies.
• Design Tuning: Optimize IT infrastructure based on pilot testing and client feedback. Test functionality, performance, and stability under realistic workloads and environments.
• Implementation: Deploy core technology and site components, stabilize the deployment, transition the project to operations and support, and obtain final customer approval. Conduct project review and customer satisfaction survey.

• Proceed to Section 8: Access to Certified Experts
• Return to the beginning of this white paper

To download a PDF file of the complete IT Outsourcing White Paper, click:
How Businesses Can Benefit by Outsourcing and Co-sourcing IT Services from Progent (PDF - 135 KB)