Someone responsible for your IT

You need an IT Manager when IT decisions are being made by someone whose real job is something else. The usual signs are a finance or operations manager losing a day a week to IT, invoices approved without anyone able to judge whether the line items were necessary, no current list of devices or licences, and a security questionnaire that takes weeks to answer. If five or more of those are true, the function needs an owner. Solvern publishes a seven-point health check on this page so you can score it in about a minute.

Because your MSP's vCIO works for your MSP. Most MSP vCIO offerings are included free or at low cost with the managed services contract, which means the person advising you on what to buy is employed by the company selling it. That is not necessarily dishonest, but it does mean nobody in the room is paid to say "cancel that, you do not need it" or "your MSP contract is overpriced, let us test the market". An independent IT Manager has no product margin, no partner tier to maintain and no renewal to protect. Solvern also works alongside your MSP rather than replacing them, so you keep the support relationship and gain someone to hold it to account.

It is quoted as a fixed monthly fee based on the number of days per month, typically between two and six. Twenty to fifty staff with a stable environment usually sits near the bottom of that range, while compliance obligations, multiple sites or a live migration push it toward the top. For comparison, a full-time IT Manager represents a significant six-figure employment cost once salary, superannuation and on-costs are counted, and organisations of this size rarely have a full week of genuine IT management work to give one. There is no lock-in: engagements run month to month on 30 days' notice.

Yes, and that band is the most common starting point. Organisations of 20 to 50 staff are usually large enough that IT decisions carry real money and real risk, but too small to justify a full-time hire. At that size an engagement typically runs two to three days a month. The better test is not headcount but whether significant IT money is being committed without anyone independent assessing it.

An IT Manager owns the operational layer: this month's renewals, the starter who begins Monday, the backup that failed on Sunday, and the MSP relationship. A vCIO works three years out on strategy, investment cases and board reporting. Organisations under about 250 staff usually need the operational role filled first, because a three-year roadmap is worth little while nobody is checking whether last night's backup completed. Solvern offers both and will tell you which one you are short of.

We manage the allocation, not the billing. Solvern is not a Cloud Solution Provider, so we do not sell you licences and earn nothing on them. What we do is own the licence position: making sure offboarded staff have their licences reclaimed rather than quietly billed month after month, that people are on the right tier for the work they do, and that you are not paying for capability you already have elsewhere. We also recommend a commitment strategy, because the discount between monthly and annual commitments is significant and most organisations default to monthly for every seat without deciding to. The same applies to your security and backup vendors and to the MSP relationship itself.

IT Manager as a Service is an outsourced, part-time IT Manager engaged for a fixed number of days each month. Solvern takes ownership of the IT function: managing the MSP and vendors, holding the budget and asset register, tracking risk and patching, and making the calls that currently land on whoever is nearest. It suits organisations of roughly 20 to 250 staff that have outgrown ad-hoc IT but cannot justify a full-time manager.

An MSP supplies the hands: the helpdesk, the monitoring, the patching. They keep the lights on, fix the leaking tap and change the batteries in the smoke alarm. An IT Manager decides what to ask for and holds the MSP to it, in the same way you would not ask a handyman to plan a kitchen renovation. Solvern does not replace your MSP and does not want to. We sit on your side of the table and manage the contract, review the tickets, and challenge the invoices.

No. If you have an MSP or an internal support person, they keep doing the work. Solvern manages the relationship, sets the priorities and checks the outcomes. Where there is a capable internal technician, this arrangement usually makes their job easier, because someone else is now handling the vendors and the budget.

The first month is documentation, so the first visible results usually land in weeks five to eight. That phase targets the cheap and urgent items: orphaned accounts closed, unused licences cancelled, backups verified by restoring one, and overdue firmware applied. In most first engagements the licence cleanup alone recovers a meaningful share of the monthly fee. A costed twelve-month roadmap follows by week twelve.

Both. Solvern is based in Perth, Western Australia, and most engagements include regular on-site days, because part of this job is walking the floor and hearing what people complain about. The rest runs remotely. Clients outside Perth are worked with nationally, with on-site visits by arrangement.

That is a normal and good outcome. The documentation, asset register, budget and roadmap are yours throughout, so the handover takes a week rather than becoming a rediscovery exercise. Solvern will also help write the job description and sit in on interviews if you want a technical ear.

No. Engagements run month to month on 30 days' notice. Solvern holds no hardware or licence commissions, so there is no incentive to stretch an engagement or steer a client toward a product.