The end of last week and half of the weekend I was out on the east coast in a workshop drilling into our IT support offerings and Managed ITServices business with 250 other MSPs, looking for ways to improve efficiency and improve their ability to deliver IT services to our customers.
I know, fun, right?
Sitting amid pages of calculations and analysis at a table full of my new friends and colleagues, I began to understand another aspect of why businesses are attracted to the Managed IT Services model for their internal IT support.
Yes, there are typically savings to be had in terms of hard and soft costs. For a fair number of businesses, it can certainly makes sense to trade centralizing IT support for access to wider and deeper pools of talent across all of the IT services every business needs. There is also a lot of value in freeing up resources in time, people and capital to focus on other core functions of the business. I discovered one more big reason that I had never considered until I sat at that table during the workshop.
Everyone in the room was singularly focused on one task, how to improve their managed IT services business and on improving the quality and efficiency of their IT support. The room was full of people trying to build the most efficient IT services machine possible.
Businesses do not have the luxury or the available resources to dedicate to continually refining their IT departments with the singular focus to delivering the best IT services possible. Businesses deliver the best IT services they can in the face of all of the requests for their limited resources.
Captive IT departments as well typically run under an entirely different set of metrics than Managed Service Providers. It is not enough to have a good IT department, or even a solid one, the best Managed Service Providers are all about delivering the best possible IT service imaginable as efficiently as possible through refined repeatable processes.
The best managed IT service providers out there are laser focused on just one objective every day; Getting better, faster, and more efficient at managing the IT support needs of their customers.
As I sat looking around at all of the business owners and executives, we all had looks of anguish and concentration on our faces as we each came to our own realization of where the holes are in our IT operations. We all had room for improvement and all we do is deliver IT services for a living.
Doing the quick math, my table had 90 years of collective IT experience and we were all struggling through different aspects of our work, on the weekend no less, to make sure we were delivering the right services to our customers in ways that reduce their IT costs, improve IT performance, and improve the End User Experience.
Like captive IT departments, Managed Service Providers research new tools and products, but the selection criteria is different because MSP’s are fundamentally trying to solve a different problem. One executive at my table talked about replacing one software package with another because his customers were complaining about response times. He made the decision to replace the package because of three too many mouse clicks. Yes, click.click.click.
The new package offered a net savings of three mouse clicks, which did not sound anything worth undergoing the pain and switching cost for until he explained that eliminating those three mouse clicks on every transaction netted out 8 hours of savings every week across his IT support staff.
Certainly not all managed IT service providers are models of efficiency, but if you want gauge the quality of one MSP vs. another, ignore basic features and price and spend time understanding their processes.
Typically the better the systems are that run the MSP, the better the Managed Services Provider.