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Open Poll for all avaya certified techs 6

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phoneguy610

Programmer
Apr 3, 2009
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Have you ever taken 2.5 hours for discovery plus 5 hours labor to do a 9-9.1 upgrade?

 
Guess he's suspecting he's being overcharged =)

But it kinda depends on how you count, what you have and what you're requirements are.

I've done upgrades that take anything from 1 hour to 12 hours, but in the later there were several steps in the upgrade and you had VM Pro, DECT and 3rd party applications.
Also the customer wanted more project management than usually required.

"Trying is the first step to failure..." - Homer
 
I'm Avaya certified also, we had a subcontractor do an upgrade because we were too busy and that's what he claimed it took him. I've done countless of these upgrades myself and it's never taken me even half that time. Just looking to see if he had any basis for his claim

 
And there were no 3rd party apps just ipo and vm pro

He blamed the extended time on one file transfer failing ...

 
That new CP does fail if upgrading from 9.1.7.
It hangs like a Singapore drug mule when backing up.
If upgrading from 9.1.3 say, go straight to the CP bin and let manager upload the required phone files automatically from your PC when it works out that it doesn't have them.
It's the wrong process i know, but i built 7 different systems last week and this is what i had to do.

Q: What do you get if you cross a creek and a brook?

A: wet.
 
Then the engineer who did the upgrade used the upgrade wizard in manager, that takes ages to complete.
I alsways remove the SD card, do a rebuild on the new version, put it back in IPO and reboot the system.
Takes less then one hour.
Then one hour more to check config and the new settings.
Upgrading VM Pro takes half an hour at max if config remain as it is and can be done while recreating the SD card.
 
Then the engineer who did the upgrade used the upgrade wizard in manager, that takes ages to complete."

Ages, yes. But not 5 hours.

APSS/ACIS/ACSS-SME
not arrogant, just succinct.
 
That depends, if you have a bad SD card then it is utterly slow.
If it fails and you do it again it could take you so much time.
The quickest way is to copy all the files your self to the SD card as it won't skip any files normally.

BAZINGA!

I'm not insane, my mother had me tested!
 
Should have agreed a time scale and price first! :)

Then he should have called once he ran into issues after the agreed time, otherwise no pay.

ACSS - SME
General Geek
 
When we do upgrades, it typically takes about 2 hours. That is using the wizard (we do upgrades remotely), plus transferring files, plus upgrading vmpro. Yeah you can string it out longer, but it's always after hours and last thing I want to do is work longer. Discovery should take about 10 minutes to make sure hardware/apps are supported. Then maybe 20 minutes downloading and upgrading admin on the PC.
Sometimes transferring from an OLD vmpro pc to a new one can take ages. I had the transfers take 3 hours, just a slow, slow network from a slow, slow vmpro machine.

I can see just some things going horribly awry, taking that long, but it should not normally. My guess is that he didn't know what he was doing.

-Austin
I used to be an ACE. Now I'm just an Arse.
qrcode.png
 
First off...you let someone else touch your systems?

We usually quote 3hrs for the whole upgrade. If stuff go wrong we have a little wiggle room and in the end with all the upgrades we should still come out ahead.

May have to put in after hours work but I can't think of a reason to have someone else work on our systems.
 
thats the sad thing, this was an "avaya platinum partner". We were overbooked and thought that they would do a decent job.

Best part is the owner is trying to act offended that we are calling them out on the gouging. They tried to say this is the norm, i guess ignoring the fact that i have done over 100 upgrades including this very IPO just 6 months ago. The vmpro server btw is brand new vmware and i did the upgrade previously from this same server.



 
I'm super curious who this partner is. I do work for some of the bigger players...I wonder if it was one of them.

-Austin
I used to be an ACE. Now I'm just an Arse.
qrcode.png
 
I certainly don't believe it was us.

I suppose with taking backups, downloading the latest files form Avaya on site (Why should You be paying for that?)
with IPO VM Pro, One-X & IPOCC it might take close to that, but with just VM Pro?
you could reprogram from scratch in less that that.



Do things on the cheap & it will cost you dear
 
5 hours of worst case scenario without SD card being bad

1 hour - Slow local Internet and downloading the admin and Vm pro files rather than having them on a USB flash drive or external HDD
.5 hour - doing a backup on the system (not while downloading because watching the progress bar is more important)
1 hour - extracting the files because the PC is really slow too
1 hour - installing admin suite onto the PC and upgrading VmPro
1.5 hour - upgrading IPO and uploading the files to the SD card

Ergo - 5 hours travel not included


Joe W.

FHandw, ACSS (SME)


"This is the end of the world, make sure to buy your T-shirt before it is too late"
Original expression of my daughter
 
Im going to hold off for now on naming them as a professional courtesy. Trying to have them do the right thing first.

Westi-

Customer has huge dedicated pipe for bandwidth so slow internet is out
Pc is extrememly fast, freshly installed server less then 6 months old beefed up running vm ware

Plus they billed us 2.5 hours for "discovery" when we got them all the ipo versions specs details, and even the server specs prior to install.

They said they were doing their "due dilligence"

Pretty convenient that we were paying for their "due dillegence"

 
If it's just an upgrade of IPO (500v2) and VMpro, without having to switch vm servers, then I usually budget 2 hours for a simple backup and upgrade and get it done in less. (Of course this depends on what release to what release I'm upgrading to and if there are any extra steps to make it jump through, going from 5.0 to 9.1? I will budget more time to make sure all is in place correctly, and move through the required multiple steps. 9.0 to 9.1 should take around 2 hours max, 3 if you got slow connections/PC and working remotely.)

If I can be onsite then the SD card way works the fastest as others have mentioned. If I'm remote, I don't sit there and stare at Manager uploading files to the SD card, and will come back to it after an hour and see if it completed fine. I do document the number of registered phones and watch them upgrade and make sure they were all successful and re-registered. (Either digital or IP)

I have never billed a customer 7.5 hours labor for an upgrade. That would be a different scenario (large SE customer with many extra's, large SCN, or if hardware failed during the upgrade process.)

'avaya platinum partner' doesn't mean they work faster or "know" more, it means they have more people with the required accreditations and probably work slower with more hoops of paperwork to jump through within their business model. More hands touching the same project and all want to get paid on it.
 
Hmm, since its only one step (9-9.1), w/ VMail Pro and nothing more. I cant imagine it taking more than 2 hours or maybe 2.5 with a slow connect. Not sure what they were discovering for that long. Might want to ask how long the tech has been certified (He could be very new or had someone walking him through), if he had to download the software or if he actually did the upgrade on site. We do several a week and I'm having a hard time even justifying 3 hours if he was on site and had done more than a dozen upgrades prior.
 
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