What You Should Do to Attain Excellence in Managed IT Services
In those moments when you find that your internal IT staff needs a certain skill to help them run business operations effectively, one way to solve that is through staff augmentation solutions. ResoluteTS IT Staff Augmentation is a good example of such a solution. But for those business leaders seeking to outsource all their IT needs to a third part, then they should go for managed IT services.
Entrepreneurs should not take the migration to managed services lightly. There are numerous decisions which businesses should take which determine the success or the failure of the managed IT services.
Sometimes, if the wrong decisions are made or the decisions are made by the wrong people, the managed services cannot serve the purpose they were intended to serve. What the managers or decision makers should understand is that the technological landscape of managed services is constantly changing.
They should understand that there are factors which should be considered for the managed IT services to be successful. Here are some secrets to excellence in managed IT services.
Service Not Server
It’s a challenge for an engineer to get lost in the technology and get to see things at a micro level. Understanding the technology is as important as looking at the services you offer and the understanding a customer environment from a business perspective.
Customer environments depend on many variables, so we should understand that even the smallest changes in these variables can significantly affect the customers. This is very important when reviewing a change request from a customer or service provider.
It’s very hard, especially in large business environments for everyone to have a holistic view of the entire platform. Therefore, being able to deal with these requests is an important ingredient to the success of managed IT services.
Technical ownership
Successful managed services providers (MSPs) utilize a support model that is built around the support model that states; for MSPs to actually manage a customer environment, they must have a technical owner. However, there are two challenges they face as the support model grows. These are:
- Ensuring that there is an in-depth knowledge of a platform across a growing number of staff, and
- Ensuring that the daily activities don’t end up in the gaps of various support teams.
While the first challenge is straightforward, the second needs some explanation. Sometimes, a support request requires numerous teams to be completed. At times, there are delays as a team might require the assistance of another team or a third party for it to complete their part of the request.
To deal with the above challenges, MSPs use a POD support model where senior engineers collectively manage a particular customer. So, having a technical owner ensures that any issues are dealt with, and requests flow smoothly between the teams. Here are some benefits of technical ownership:
- Issues are resolved faster because of in-depth knowledge of platform and support groups.
- The POD can become an extension of the customer’s IT business.
- Engineers with a better understanding of the platform are given direct access.
App vendor relationships
The goal of many MSPs is to develop relationships with customers. However, it is also important to develop strong relationships with customer app developers. Apart from developing such relationships, it allows everyone to play their roles also. Let’s imagine the following scenario:
A critical business app becomes unresponsive and then triggers a monitoring alarm. The app users cannot identify the issue with the app nor the app developers. The question which comes next is what’s the next step? Here, is where the good relationships pay off.
Contacting the engineers from both sides is the only way to make the app responsive again. The resolution time can be affected if such communication channels and relationships are lacking. This, in turn, frustrates the customer who wants the issue to be fixed.
Staff training
Any business is only as good as its employees, and this doesn’t exclude the MSPs. This might look like a very obvious statement, but many businesses lack staff training support from the MSPs.
Training in whatever level ensures employees are constantly updated with the latest technologies. Training also assists to businesses to be awarded partner certifications like Microsoft and Cisco amongst others. Investing in staff training pays back, at times two-fold or even three-fold.
