IT Department Stand-Up

What you'll walk away with

• 12-18 month IT hiring plan with roles, sequencing, and budget ranges
• Designed MSP-to-internal handoff plan (what moves in-house, what stays with the MSP, SLAs for both)
• Tooling baseline (ticketing, monitoring, endpoint management, identity, backup) matched to stage
• First hire(s) onboarded and ramped

The problem this solves

At some point, MSP-only support stops being enough. Users want faster response and someone who knows the company. Leadership wants strategic IT input, not just ticket closure. Regulatory complexity — GxP systems, access controls, audit trails — climbs past what a general-purpose MSP is built to absorb.

The failure mode is predictable: a company hires an IT Manager or Director without a plan. Scope is unclear, tooling was never rationalized, the MSP relationship was never renegotiated. The hire can't figure out what they own and is gone in eighteen months. I've built IT departments from scratch before. This engagement is the plan that makes the first hire work.

What the engagement looks like

Five phases over three to six months. Everything virtual. On-site available for first-hire onboarding and MSP transition cutover if travel is covered.

Weeks 1–3: Current-state assessment. What is the MSP actually doing? What is leadership silently assigning to "whoever we hire"? The real scope is almost always larger than anyone has written down.

Weeks 4–6: Target organization design. Roles, reporting line, sequencing, and budget ranges calibrated to where the company is — not where it might be in five years.

Weeks 7–10: MSP handoff plan. What moves in-house, what stays, what gets renegotiated. Revised SOW recommendations and SLA structure for both sides.

Weeks 11–16: Tooling baseline and candidate sourcing. Ticketing, RMM, endpoint management, identity, backup, monitoring — rationalized to stage. Candidate sourcing and interview loop support run in parallel.

Weeks 17–20 (optional): Onboard and ramp first hire. Planned handoff of the function closes the engagement.

Who it's most useful for

• Companies past 100 people still running IT through an MSP alone
• Leadership frustrated with response times or the MSP's inability to own regulatory alignment
• Companies where a prior attempt to hire IT leadership failed
• Post-merger or post-acquisition IT integration situations
• Companies planning commercial launch and wanting internal IT in place 6–12 months ahead

What you'll walk away with

A functioning early-stage IT department. The first hire arrives against a documented tooling baseline, a renegotiated MSP relationship, and an onboarding playbook — not a blank slate. The MSP stays where it adds value. Internal IT owns what it should. This is a time-boxed engagement with a planned exit. The deliverable is a department that runs without me.

Common questions

Do you stay on as the IT leader long-term? No. This engagement is explicitly time-boxed with a planned exit. Ongoing senior IT leadership after stand-up is the Advisory retainer — a separate structure built for exactly that.

Do you recruit the first hire, or advise our HR team? Both are available. I can run the candidate loop directly or coach your HR team through it. That gets scoped at the start of the engagement.

What if the first hire doesn't work out? The onboarding playbook is written to the role and the tooling baseline, not to a specific person. Whoever follows walks into a documented environment.

Most effective alongside ongoing leadership

After stand-up, many clients bring in an Advisory retainer so the new internal hire has a senior resource to escalate to — someone who can weigh in on hard vendor decisions and carry board-level technology reporting that a first IT hire isn't positioned to own yet.

Deliverables

• Hiring plan document (roles, job descriptions, sequencing)
• MSP handoff plan with revised SOW recommendations
• Tooling baseline recommendation with selection rationale
• Onboarding playbook for first internal IT hire(s)