An IT maintenance contract is signed once and endured for years. It is worth spending an afternoon on it. This is what we would look at if we were on the other side of the table.
What must be in writing
- The exact scope: which machines, which servers, which services. And what falls outside it, spelled out just as clearly.
- Response SLAs by severity, with specific hours. “As soon as possible” is not a commitment.
- Cover hours and what happens outside them. If there is 24/7 on-call cover, what it costs and how it is triggered.
- Inventory and documentation: kept up to date, and yours, not the provider’s.
- A regular report: what has happened, what has been done, what is outstanding and what is recommended.
- An exit clause: notice period and the obligation to hand over access, passwords and documentation.
Signs that look bad
- The administrator passwords are held by the provider alone and they will not hand them over to you. That is, quite simply, a polite kidnapping.
- A long minimum term with a disproportionate penalty.
- It is all “hours included” but nobody defines what an hour is or how it is accounted for.
- There is no report. If you cannot find out what they have done for you this month, you will not be able to tell whether it is worth it either.
- Monitoring gets invoiced but no alert ever arrives. Either everything is running perfectly, or nothing is being monitored.
A good maintenance contract is one that lets you leave easily. Which is precisely why hardly anybody leaves.
Block of hours or flat fee
A block of hours works well when your need is occasional and you have somebody in-house handling the day-to-day. It has a well-known perverse effect: since every call eats into the balance, people tend not to call, and small problems are left to grow.
A flat fee works out better when you want to delegate properly, because it aligns the incentives: it is in the provider’s interest for you to have no incidents, not lots of them. It is the model we recommend as soon as servers are involved.
One final question for the salesperson
“If I sack you tomorrow, what do you hand over and how quickly?”. The face they pull while answering will tell you almost everything you need to know.
