Decision review / MSP contracts
It renews in ninety days. Do you know what it actually covers?
Most managed services agreements are signed once and renewed by silence. The environment grows, the ticket volume changes, the scope stays exactly where it was in year one, and the things everybody assumes are covered turn out to be listed under exclusions on page eleven.
Where the money goes
What the agreement says, and what the invoices say.
What we usually find
- Scope written for the environment as it was on the day it was signed
- Project work billed hourly that the fixed fee was supposed to cover
- Service levels defined on response time, never on resolution
- Onboarding and offboarding priced per event, unbudgeted and unmonitored
- An exit clause requiring notice you would have to give before you knew you needed to
None of this is necessarily sharp practice. Most of it is a contract that stopped matching reality and nobody reopened.
What you get back
- A line-by-line read of scope against twelve months of actual invoices
- The exclusions that matter, in plain language, with what they cost you
- A view on whether the fee is reasonable for the work being delivered
- The three or four clauses worth reopening, ranked by what they are worth
- What leaving would actually take, including who holds your documentation
We hold no reseller or referral agreements with managed service providers.
How it runs
Documents in, positions out.
This is mostly desk work on material you already have, which makes it one of the faster things we do and one of the easiest to keep quiet.
Commissioned as a scoped review at a fixed fee, agreed in writing before anything starts.
You send the paperwork
Agreement, schedules, twelve months of invoices, and ticket data if you have it. No contact with your provider at any point unless you ask for it.
We read it against reality
What was promised, what was excluded, what was billed, and what your team says actually happens when they raise a ticket.
You get renegotiation positions
Not a complaint letter. A ranked list of what to ask for, what you are likely to get, and what to concede in exchange for it.
Who you are working with
The other side of this table is familiar territory.
VanDien.io is led by Christopher Moskowitz, who most recently ran engineering for Jefferies, a full service capital markets, investment bank, leading a 55-person organization on a budget of $15M to $20M. Managing a budget that size means having signed, renewed, renegotiated and walked away from a great many of these agreements, from the buyer’s chair, with the outcome landing on his own numbers.
Related reviews
The same reading, pointed elsewhere.
Common questions
Do you want to replace our MSP?
No. We do not provide managed services and we take no referral fee from anyone who does, so replacing them earns us nothing. A good number of these reviews end with a recommendation to keep the incumbent and renegotiate three specific clauses.
Will our MSP find out?
Not from us. Most of this is done from documents you already hold. If you later want us in the room for the renegotiation, that is your call to make afterwards.
What do you need to do the review?
The agreement and any schedules, the last twelve months of invoices, and ticket volumes if you can export them. The gap between what the contract describes and what the invoices show is usually where the finding is.
What if we are mid-term and cannot leave?
Then the useful output is leverage rather than an exit: which clauses are negotiable at renewal, which are worth raising now, and what to start documenting so that the next conversation is not conducted entirely on their information.
Send us the agreement and the last twelve invoices.
info@vandien.io · (551) 236-3191 · Ridgewood, NJ, serving the New York metro