In 2018, one of the most booming and attractive services has been the IT Managed Services companies. With Managed IT Services companies can sit back and not worry about their technological requirements and management as it’s being done for them, allowing companies to focus on what important – sales and internal operational growth. However, it’s important to utilise the arrangement fully in order to get the most value from your Managed Services Provider (MSP). This is what we will be looking at throughout this article.
First let’s take a look at how it works. The arrangement between a company and their MSP can have a very broad spectrum, a MSP can take on the full operational control of your IT operations to augmenting the existing IT staff who can focus on specialising software and systems. To just keeping some monitoring/recovery measures in place and be reactive to what happens digitally with the business.
What are the benefits?
When it comes to retaining qualified IT professionals the door is revolving. There’s a lot of turnover within the industry, and most business leaders don’t have the expertise to evaluate hires and make sure they’re getting a quality employee who understands multiple systems and beyond the full-time work they know they will put forward new technologies to stay ahead of competitors.
An outside provider deals with dozens of clients. It is exposed to best practices across industries and the latest techniques that can help you make decisions about how you use technology and how you deploy new technologies with the assistance of an expert on software, hardware and configurations, pain points can be solved extremely quickly.
With this in mind, security is another issue. So much of business operations are tied up in IT that if a relationship goes sour, that’s to keep an individual from doing damage or at times, even locking things up when he/she leaves? Now there are issues even if the relationship between that internal staff doesn’t go bad as your organisation is dependent on one or a few individuals. With an MSP, you spread the risk and protect your company from being at the mercy or just one individual since you have an entire staff dedicated to your business’ systems.
How do we start an MSP relationship?
First of all, contact us.
There are 3 key steps that you can begin with when dealing with an MSP.
1.Engage Your MSP Provider: Contact us.
Once you select an MSP provider, the first order of business will be to engage the vendor in your company’s culture and workforce operations. Some organisations will have the MSP do a formal assessment for this purpose. But whether formal or informal, the MSP will need an enterprise view of your organisation.
The MSP will usually want a wide variety of information on your hiring and other practices and will need to get to know your key people. Keep in mind that working with an MSP team is much more of a partnership than a typical client/vendor relationship. By treating them as another member of your team, and creating a free-flowing exchange of ideas, the MSP team will gain valuable insights into your organisation that will enable them to develop more incisive solution recommendations.
2.Share Your Data.
Data offers one of the best ways to get an accurate picture of your workforce challenges. By making such information readily available to the MSP, it will enable the MSP to offer truly informed workforce solutions.
When the MSP has a more statistical view of your workforce, they can develop a strategic plan tailored to your specific organisational needs. In addition, a quality MSP will bring an industry-wide view, with knowledge of best practices and strategies, that can be statistically compared with your data. This can provide valuable insights that could lead to more cost-effective and efficient strategic decisions going forward.
3.Set Realistic Key Performance Indicators.
Once data gathering and analysis is complete, your MSP should then recommend solutions along with an action plan to address your workforce challenges. Part of that plan will likely involve instituting best practices when it comes to security, staffing and other areas to enable your organisation to achieve better, more cost-efficient process levels.
To get there, you and your MSP will work together to establish key performance indicators (KPIs) that each party – the MSP and your business — agree to carry out. KPIs are quantifiable measures that can be used to gauge or compare performance.
In setting up the KPIs, remember to keep them realistic and to ensure both you – and the MSP provider – are comfortable with the requirements. This will lead to greater success in addressing your workforce challenges in the most timely, efficient and cost-effective manner possible.
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