You’re not a technology business, or maybe you are – but for your organization, IT is not the kind of technology you should be managing. Whatever the reason you entrusted a managed service provider to take care of your information technology needs, here are some of the most common issues I’ve seen between MSPs and their clients and what you can do about it today.
1. Understanding Your Service Level Agreement (SLA)
Service Level Agreements typically lay out quality, availability, and the nature of the service being provided. They will typically spell out how long it takes for them to initially respond to a request, or how much they guarantee that you can access your systems. It’s important to understand not only what happens when everything is running smoothly, but what happens when things don’t go according to plan.
- When it’s been more than 4 hours and a qualified technician hasn’t responded?
- When your service has been down for a day longer than the uptime agreement?
- Who determines the facts when an issue or question arises?
If you are counting on your MSP to govern their own performance, every miscommunication or misalignment will fall on you as the client. Understanding whether or not your MSP is performing has a serious effect on the performance of your other team members.
2. Being Seen
A great quality check is to evaluate how well your MSP knows your organization and its level of engagement. What I’ve seen most commonly is that MSPs aren’t fully engaged with their clients, typically serving a limited role with specific aspects of systems and business units. It’s important to know how well your MSP understands their blind spots, such as what group in the organization they interact with but don’t manage their systems or data.
- Did they document where they allow internal, but unmanaged data access?
- How often are they updating critical contacts and reviews of your systems?
- Do they know where you would like to take your organization a few years down the road? If so, do they know how to help you with this?
If you’re not having these conversations every time you renew your contract, you’ve put your MSP and your IT on auto-pilot, which means it is no longer being managed. I’m not criticizing that decision as there are many successful organizations that have great relationships with their MSPs that are very lightly managed, but I think it’s critical to know what decisions are being made regarding your cybersecurity, information access, and process automation.
3. Relationship Intelligence
Metrics. Numbers that are easy to misinterpret or use correctly. It’s tempting, for example, to require a performance metric of a reduction in service requests per user, but does that mean there are actually fewer problems – or that your MSP is pushing your organization to try fewer new things? What you track and are aware of drives behavior, which in turn creates culture. Consider pushing your relationship where you actually want it to go.
- Response time only says how long it took for the helpdesk to reply by e-mail. Pair this metric with time-to-resolution.
- A total number of issues tells you how much time your team is waiting on service, but issues by system helps you understand the problem.
- Exceptions are important to separate out for attention and a narrative.
Metrics, like relationships, businesses, and knowledge need to grow and change, especially when it comes to business relationships for core operational functions like information technology. Managing this relationship benefits from dedicating some thoughtful time to understanding what should be measured so that decisions can be made on what to do about it. If you happen to have any questions about it or would like to have a discussion, please reach out to us for a quick and free consultation – check out Our Services or Contact Us at the top of the page.
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