How to Pinpoint the Root Cause of MSP Chaos

Ahhh, things are running smoothly!

Sure, maybe you are not fully leveraging the Autotask PSA software, but at least your Service Delivery Issues are few and far between…or are they?

We tip our hats to any MSP that can boast:

• Less than 20 open tickets per Tech

• Fewer than 5 overdue tickets per Tech

• No Incident tickets older than 7 days

• No Non-Project Service Request tickets older than 30 days

• Projects ending on-time and on-budget

If you are not here, you’re going to want to watch the replay of our webinar, “Divide & Conquer: Finding the Root Cause of Service Delivery Issues.” HERE

Even If You’re Running a Kickass MSP, You Can still improve.
Our guess is that your Customers are Raving Fans and would never consider finding another Service Provider who keeps them in the loop throughout the Customer request life cycle. And we assume that with so few tickets, the Techs are doing Real-Time Time Entry.   Indeed, there are MSPs that run a tight ship or are overstaffed and pull off providing this kind of service day in and day out.

Even in a well-run MSP, the 14 KPIs that we recommend show a significant level of Chaos. 
Significant, meaning the Intake and Open Ticket Management, profitability, and Tech performance could all improve.

When I left the MSP I was working for, my dream was to take the fist full of Advanced Live Reports we used to track these KPIs and share them with any other MSP that needed KPI help.

Boy, was I surprised. You see, I came from an MSP that had been in business for over 30 years, had a Level 4.5 out of 5 on Service Leadership Maturity scale, and was in the CRN top 150.

This means the Service Delivery Foundation and fully leveraged Autotask had been achieved. When I had arrived, they had a lot of the foundation in place and knew the Autotask software pretty well, but it took another 7 years to optimize the tool and Service Delivery – with profits improving by more than 10% year over year.

And yet, I can assure you that even though things are running smoothly from your perspective, there is almost always room for improvement.

So, what does a continuous improvement program look like?

How do you find where to make improvements?  When do you find an area that needs improvement? How do you know if it’s significant to the Customers, Profit, or Employees to merit the effort?  

Once a significant group of tickets is identified, who do you collaborate with to brainstorm possible corrective action?

The holy grail is to work thru this part of the process, and then establish a KPI to benchmark and track whether the corrective action is working - or if the corrective action needs corrective action.

Oh my goodness, does anyone have that level of skill? And if so, what is the skill or process that we are looking for - so we know it when we see it? Root Cause Analysis process applied to the Service Delivery operation, and then leveraging the Autotask PSA software to implement the solution.

Here is a Real-World Example 

What I found when starting Advanced Global is that many MSPs were lacking foundational processes. Most MSPs Intake a Customer request without fully triaging it, add it to a queue, and ask the Techs to figure it out. If the request has a high level of urgency and a high level of impact (ITIL’s definition of Critical – not a Customers definition, which is “I want it now”), then it is all hands-on deck.

That approach delays the engagement process and pisses off the Customer (because at that point nobody knows what is going on or is going to be done). Not to mention it causes an incredible waste of profits (Multiply the # of Critical Requests per year * # of Techs * 24 minutes (.4 of an hour) * your standard bill rate. It will equal the cost of an All-Hands-on-deck approach at your MSP). For a 6 Tech Team with a standard role rate of USD $150, and engaging on 3 requests per week, the calculation is 156 * 6 * .4 * 150 = USD $56,160.

So, doing a Root Cause Analysis to find a better workflow SOP for Critical tickets for an MSP profiting USD $561,600 will save the bottom-line 10%. And that is how someone can impact the bottom-line by 10% year over year – by applying Root Cause Analysis to the Service Delivery operation over and over, continually looking for improvements.

If Only It Were That Easy for All MSPs…

Alas, most of the time, it is not that easy. Most MSP high urgency and high impact Customer Requests and some non-definitions of a project are divided out from other requests, so they are relatively easy to conquer. What is needed for the rest of the issues - hidden or in your face - (they always seem to be one way or the other – why is that?) is to divide them from the rest of the requests so they also can be conquered.

Allow us to let you in on a little secret. There are 11 workflows that every MSP engages on. Dividing all the types of Customer requests you receive into one of these 11 workflows (some MSPs have more – think Sales and Procurement) is the first step in improving the Service Delivery operation. Conquering Service Delivery Issues workflow by workflow takes leveraging the Autotask software.

Here’s Your Takeaway Summary:

In case you missed it in the middle of the article, here are the steps in the Root Cause Analysis:

1)    Divide (segment) a group of tickets that are not meeting expectations into a separate workflow.

2)    Determine if not meeting expectations is significant enough of an impact to merit Conquering.

3)    Find a group of fellow Gladiators (you know the ones who fight the good fight and bring order to chaos) who have been there and done that and know the nitty-gritty of getting the job done, to collaborate with.

4)    They will also know or be able to figure out how to benchmark, track and leverage a KPI.

Take action, implement corrective action, including Corrective Action on the Corrective Action (I know, that’s a lot of corrective actions
there…, but the Corrective Action you need to focus on is taking the first step in finding the Root Cause of any significant group of tickets).

Need help Finding the Root Cause of your Service Delivery Issues? Schedule a call with Steve HERE

When the day is done and profits increase, pat yourself on the back because no one else will, and get back in there to find another fight that is worth fighting.