Company Stubburn on Upgrading

A company I have done work for contacted me requesting a quote on a solution to allow a few remote offices access to their accounting system.

I said no problem, let me get back to you.

But there is, and repeatedly I have been unable to get the managers of the company to realize it. Their server is a single core xeon 3.2ghz, 1gb ram, server 2003 standard sp1, serving up mas90 to 12 users, shared files, printers, etc... and now they want to add 2-5 more via terminal services for remote sites. It needs to be replaced. Period. End of story. I am not over-loading an already over-loaded server.

I have already convinced them that their fractional T1 640/640 will not be able to support a 20+ employee company and remote terminals. Frankly, I'm surprised they have been getting by with that speed and they are upgrading to a full T1 or 3x3 business Ethernet.

What in the hell should I do? I really want to drop these guys, but ofcourse, would really like to keep the company. All of their stuff is borderline breaking and it's a potential good client if I can explain in idiot terms why they need to upgrade and there is no other way.

You'd think with a company of that size AND expanding to more locations, they wouldn't have trouble understanding that the $20,000 cost in licensing, labor, and consultants (for the accounting system), is money well spent.

Hard sometimes till gear fails. In your case find a way to replace the first server and add moir functionality say sbs server and re just the old for a ts box

I work for one of the larger tech service companies in the world. I'm still trying to convince our bosses that the Optiplex GX2xx workstations we've got on the call center floor need to be replaced. Fortunately, they're slowly dying off. Lost a GX270 today to a blown capacitor and we're having hard drive failures left and right.

Our IT guy may be heading on to greener pastures and he's mentioned that I may end up filling his seat. I'm excited at the prospect but he's made it clear that he has virtually no pull when it comes to having equipment replaced; he's been fighting that losing battle for years.

So if I do get put in his position, I'm not sure what I'm going to do either. Fortunately, since a certain OS manufacturer is one of our clients (and our center houses their internal help desk), we're getting Windows 7 pushed out to all the PCs sooner or later. I think I'd have to play the "Windows 7 is mandatory, hardware that meets OS requirements is mandatory" card.

Of course, I'm putting the cart before the horse... I'm not calling the shots yet.

sometimes you have to look at it differently- they are paying you to do a job; that is add some terminal users to their existing setup. as long as you clearly explain to them why this is not optimal and they are aware of the possible problems with doing this (possibly get it in writing that they understand) like overloading or crashing the server, then just go forward with it and collect the money.

then when shit hits the fan, you just say (in nicer wording) "i told you so, now its going to cost another $xx to do it correctly, would you like to listen to what i have to say this time?". and leave it at that. at the very worst they say "No" and you get paid for one more job before loosing the company. thats more money then you would have if you just drop them now. at best, you keep the client and the income you make from them and maybe eventually they will have to upgrade when their stuff finally kicks off.

give the customer what they want, even if what they want is stupid.

Ghost makes a good point, it is hard to see a client fail, but sometimes it's the only way to get them to understand. The best you can do is DOCUMENT your reccomendations and the advice against their plan of action and then, unless it's absolutely ludicrous, perform it to the best of your ability. There will always be fly-by-night tech guys/companies that will promise the world on a dime budget and screw everything up. It making yourself better than them that will keep your clients happy and the wayward ones coming back to you.

One quick question that I have, if they are riding on just 1GB or ram, they'll pony up for you to do the remote leg work, but not the $100 for 4GB of ram?!

Yup, some places will not listen, they expect you to wring every last drop of blood from their existing hardware until it goes up in a mushroom cloud and they're down for a long time.

Voice your concerns strongly, document what you do...and document "repairs/downtime"...so that they can see over time that maintaining old and failing equipment does add up cost-wise.

Eventually it will fail and they'll have to get all new equipment..and you'll be waiting!

awesomo said:

A company I have done work for contacted me requesting a quote on a solution to allow a few remote offices access to their accounting system.

I said no problem, let me get back to you.

But there is, and repeatedly I have been unable to get the managers of the company to realize it. Their server is a single core xeon 3.2ghz, 1gb ram, server 2003 standard sp1, serving up mas90 to 12 users, shared files, printers, etc... and now they want to add 2-5 more via terminal services for remote sites. It needs to be replaced. Period. End of story. I am not over-loading an already over-loaded server.

I have already convinced them that their fractional T1 640/640 will not be able to support a 20+ employee company and remote terminals. Frankly, I'm surprised they have been getting by with that speed and they are upgrading to a full T1 or 3x3 business Ethernet.

What in the hell should I do? I really want to drop these guys, but ofcourse, would really like to keep the company. All of their stuff is borderline breaking and it's a potential good client if I can explain in idiot terms why they need to upgrade and there is no other way.

You'd think with a company of that size AND expanding to more locations, they wouldn't have trouble understanding that the $20,000 cost in licensing, labor, and consultants (for the accounting system), is money well spent.

Click to expand...

Even a full T1 or 3mbit connection might not be enough for 20 concurrent RDP users, depending on the application and color settings. Check out this white paper - http://download.microsoft.com/downl...-969e7a146d1b/RDP_Performance_WhitePaper.docx

Just put your recomendations together in a proposal. Tell them they require these upgrades (Full T1, new server, etc) but break the costs down into line items. Explain what the potential performance issues will be, and how much they will cost to repair. If they want to proceed with simply letting additonal users access the resources, they'll know exactly how to resolve the impending issues.

The way to start out your task is to get there exact business expectations for now and future. Plan your project proposal around the expectations or needs of the business. Tell them the benifits of said project, what it will entail how line item pricing. People need to see where that $20,000 is going, you can't just throw that line in there at the end.

three sections of your proposal need to be the following

1) business requirements
2) technical requirements
3) recommendations (based on 1 and 2)

This gives the owner the knowledge that you know there needs, you know the technical requirements and restraints and have your recomendations ready. Then you go into the hardware/software phase and the work plan

Do that and you with either get the business or not, but you will know that you did everything you can to get it done

@da_sponge.
There are around 20 local users, there will be a max of 5 remotely.

@Ghost6303
I have tried to look at it before. My main concern is so far I have one company I have "Agreed" to add users or services to existing aged hardware. And when everything goes to hell, I am to blame for it not working. It is my fault their company is losing thousands of dollars during downtime. And to top it off, they don't want to pay me because it was my mistake (which, not once yet, was downtime my mistake). That is the same vibe I am getting from this company. Especially because it took them nearly 3 months to pay my last less than $100 invoice.

@K1pp3r
I have not given them a price yet, because I haven't gone above pricing out the initial request yet because they haven't even entertained the idea of needing to upgrade. That is just a quickly thrown together number from pricing. It will be broken out on a part by part basis, and why the company will require it for an optimal configuration.

My biggest concern is the "jump" factor. AKA things break or are extremely slow, and I'm expected to jump to fix it or I won't be able to fix it because of inferior hardware/software and be dubbed incompetent. You can make people sign papers, and repeat it every chance you get, and it will still be your fault that nothing works how they expected, they will feel ripped off, and they will spread falsehoods among the local business community. I have seen this happen, and destroy people.

If they disagree with the upgrade, I'm sure I will drop them. I don't need any bad vibes due to the ignorance of clients.

Thanks for the insights.

awesomo said:

My biggest concern is the "jump" factor. AKA things break or are extremely slow, and I'm expected to jump to fix it or I won't be able to fix it because of inferior hardware/software and be dubbed incompetent. You can make people sign papers, and repeat it every chance you get, and it will still be your fault that nothing works how they expected, they will feel ripped off, and they will spread falsehoods among the local business community. I have seen this happen, and destroy people.

If they disagree with the upgrade, I'm sure I will drop them. I don't need any bad vibes due to the ignorance of clients.

Thanks for the insights.

Click to expand...

Exactly - doing a job half right isn't worth the fallout when and if it doesn't work, especially when you know it won't work before you start. Fire the client. It's a hard choice to make, especially in these times, but taking a little money now and having a reputation get smeared (despite your warnings, it's always your fault) costs more in the long run. Quote the job including all the hardware, tell them to take it or leave it without a line-item veto, and move on.

awesomo said:

I have tried to look at it before. My main concern is so far I have one company I have "Agreed" to add users or services to existing aged hardware. And when everything goes to hell, I am to blame for it not working. It is my fault their company is losing thousands of dollars during downtime. And to top it off, they don't want to pay me because it was my mistake (which, not once yet, was downtime my mistake). That is the same vibe I am getting from this company. Especially because it took them nearly 3 months to pay my last less than $100 invoice.


My biggest concern is the "jump" factor. AKA things break or are extremely slow, and I'm expected to jump to fix it or I won't be able to fix it because of inferior hardware/software and be dubbed incompetent. You can make people sign papers, and repeat it every chance you get, and it will still be your fault that nothing works how they expected, they will feel ripped off, and they will spread falsehoods among the local business community. I have seen this happen, and destroy people.

Click to expand...

without knowing the specifics of your relationship with this client company or about the business you work for or "agreements" you have made, i would say you need to get more in writing to protect yourself. it is perfectly fine if they want to use their existing hardware until it runs into the ground, it should be no skin off your back, however you need it in writing that they acknowledge and choose to disregard your advice, and you need to outline exactly what your responsibilities are (and explicitly state that you will not be responsible for catastrophys resulting from this) before you start working on the project.

this way when the server crashes and their workers cant get online or print or anything, if they come calling you, all you do is produce this piece of paper, that they signed off on, and say "look, not my problem, it says right here, i warned you that this would probably happen and you decided to ignore me..... now that what i predicted has come true, you should trust my judgment. this is what im going to charge you to fix it...."

there is no reason you cant write up a proposal that includes terms that are acceptable to you and submit it to them and say take it or leave it.

or just tell them to sit and spin and dont deal with them anymore if they are really that dumb. its really up to you and how much you want them. if they cant cover a $100 invoice, a new server is going to be a hard sell.

ghost6303 said:

there is no reason you cant write up a proposal that includes terms that are acceptable to you and submit it to them and say take it or leave it.

or just tell them to sit and spin and dont deal with them anymore if they are really that dumb. its really up to you and how much you want them. if they cant cover a $100 invoice, a new server is going to be a hard sell.

Click to expand...

This.

ghost6303 said:

without knowing the specifics of your relationship with this client company or about the business you work for or "agreements" you have made, i would say you need to get more in writing to protect yourself.....

Click to expand...

That's all well and good in theory, but what's on paper has nothing to do with what comes out of people's mouths. Many times it's not even the people that signed the paper, but instead their bosses or underlings that are the ones that will drag your name through the mud. Most of us have had clients that would blame everything that went wrong on us whether it was our fault or not.

One of my companies used to do some contract work for a school district that was rolling out laptops to each student 7-12. Although we had absolutetly nothing to do with student use policies or enforcement, we took a beating with parents and the school board because of issues that we had absolutely no control over. Just because our duties were clearly spelled out on paper didn't mean anything when it came to public perception, everything was our fault because we 'did computer stuff for the school'. They were our biggest client at the time, but I eventually dropped them. The last straw was having a different business in town bring in a machine that they had purchased from the school district's surplus sale that was still joined to the school's domain, had hundreds of dollars in licensed software on it, and had student's personal info on it. Sometimes you can't afford the liability that certain clients create.

When I was in the consulting world we had this very situation all the time. People didn't want to spend the money to do it right and would rather piece it together and hope for the best. We had so many times where we would do what the customer requested and it would blow up and in turn it would be our fault costings us money and resources to again piece it together even more.

We finally said fuck it. Enough is Enough. With every quote for project work we included a statement of work that included a brief description of the project and what was intended to be accomplished. A line item summary of the steps we are expecting to be preformed during this project. A clear understanding of when the project would turn over from the system engineer involved to regular help desk support and if the project had some question items such as what your dealing with parts were in there and defined that the customer was responsible for the outcome after we had preformed the task that had been requested. The customer would sign this along with the quote letting us know that they understand the terms of the project and the expected outcome of that said project. This in turn really became binding allowing us to bill for extra items "outside of the project". Also held us accountable to complete the things we said we would complete

The long and short is the same as what other people are stating. Define your terms in black and white. Let this place know that there is no gray area here. You'll do what they want but when it sucks miserably it falls on them not you. If they can't agree to the terms and sign on to complete the project, they can find someone else to screw it up.

Plain and Simple.

quote 1) price with all recommendations
quote 2) bare minimum prices
caveats: (detail potential issues and risks)
quote 3) price to upgrade after the fact

should solve the problem, give them a fix and an upgrade path in the future,
pressure from you is not going to do anything, outages and pressure from the users will.