Take stock first
What runs, on what, supported by whom, licensed until when. For most businesses this is the first written inventory they have ever held, and it routinely finds renewals nobody was tracking.
Services
Support is easy to buy and hard to judge. Everyone offers it, every proposal reads the same, and the difference only becomes visible on the day something breaks — which is the worst possible moment to find out what you actually bought.
The situation
For businesses whose systems are now too important to be looked after by whoever happens to be good with computers.
In most established mid-sized businesses, support is a person rather than an arrangement. A finance manager who is capable with systems becomes the first line for the whole office. It works, until the week it does not — and in the meantime the business is paying a finance manager to do a job it did not hire one for.
The second failure is quieter and more expensive. Backups run and nobody has attempted a restore. Licences renew automatically at a price nobody reviewed. A supplier holds operational knowledge that exists nowhere in writing. None of these is a problem on its own, and they tend to become a problem together.
Statutory change is the standing test of whether an arrangement is real. NSSF limits moved again in February 2026, taking the maximum employee deduction from KSh 4,320 to KSh 6,480; SHIF replaced NHIF in October 2024 with a percentage of gross pay and no upper cap where NHIF had bands. Every one of those changes had to reach payroll before a deadline. Support that only answers when called does not handle that class of work.
What changes
Most organisations arrive at this practice from a recognisable place. This is the distance it covers.
Faults reported by the people they affect
Issues caught by monitoring first
Backups assumed to be working
Recovery tested rather than hoped for
Internal staff pulled off their jobs onto support
Your team back on the work you hired them for
Vendors pointing at each other
One party accountable for the outcome
What this practice covers
Engagements draw on whichever of these the situation needs. Very few use all of them, and we will say which we think apply before you commit to anything.
Day-to-day support of the applications the business trades on, with monitoring that finds problems before the people using them do.
The infrastructure underneath, including the recovery arrangements that are worth exactly what they were last tested at.
One party carrying the outcome across every vendor involved, so nobody in your business spends their week refereeing between suppliers.
Security oversight and a standing review rhythm, so the estate improves between incidents rather than only after them.
How it runs
Every engagement has a decision point at the end of each stage. You can stop at any one of them, and what you have paid for up to that point is yours to take elsewhere.
What runs, on what, supported by whom, licensed until when. For most businesses this is the first written inventory they have ever held, and it routinely finds renewals nobody was tracking.
Which systems the business genuinely cannot trade without, and what an acceptable outage looks like for each. Service levels follow business consequence, rather than everything being treated as equally urgent.
Monitoring, defined response, named contacts and an escalation route that works whether or not you happen to know someone. The arrangement is written down, which is what makes it reviewable.
A scheduled service review with the same people: what broke, what was slow, what is due for renewal, what changed in the business, and what should change in the arrangement as a result.
What you get
Advisory work is easy to buy and hard to hold on to. These are the artefacts that remain with you afterwards, and they belong to you whether or not the engagement continues.
Where this is not the answer
We do not take on an estate we have not assessed. Agreeing service levels for systems nobody has inventoried is how support contracts come to cover everything in principle and nothing in practice — and both sides only discover which during the first serious incident.
Tell us what you are trying to improve and we will tell you, plainly, whether we are the right people for it.
Also in services
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