Operational Transformation: The Best Path for MSPs to Find the Freedom to Grow!
Welcome to 2025, Autotask Warriors! I am so glad you are here.
The other day, a Service Coordinator named Scott was in a team meeting and was told the Owner wanted to be more efficient. How were they to do this? By using the RMM tool to automate everything so Techs would not have to connect to machines. There was no budget for any other tools or changes.
Automating existing (or lack of) inefficient Standard Operating Procedures is equivalent to doing the same things over and over expecting different results – insanity.
Granted, you are doing them faster and in some cases without as much manual labor, but that only gives a MSP marginal improvement. To really make the jump to optimization, MSPs need to rethink both their Service Delivery and Project Management Standard Operating Procedures, and quite frankly, the Operational Procedures that feed into (Sales, Inventory, and Procurement) and out of (Invoicing) these two Operational centers.
What is needed is a whole new way of thinking. For example, at most MSPs, the primary SOP is to dump the ticket into a queue and ask the Techs to figure out what to work on next. This is great if the Tech has been there since the beginning of time, knows all the Clients, and has no social life – but to scale, something needs to change.
Even automating this process without developing a robust intake process is a guesstimate that is wrong a significant amount of time, is then reduced to pushing e-paper around, and having the Techs work even harder second guessing the automation.
For automation to work, four significant mindset changes need to take place.
Guiding an MSP through the four mindset changes transforms the operation from a Reactive, Break/Fix depending on Tech grey matter (even automated grey matter) setup, to a Pro-Active, Data Driven, non-Tech dependent Operation.
Once the 4-Pillars of Transformation (mindset changes) have been introduced to an MSP, the Operational Efficiency organically improves by 10%, mostly by driving out the guess work on what the Right Next Ticket is. It also includes the added benefit of knowing where every open Client Request (ticket) is at, and which ones need some level of coordination or management intervention to drive them from new to complete.
Many times, I have watched Service Delivery Teams spend valuable time reviewing all the open tickets without leaving any engagement time to complete any one on the list, when 63% of the tickets are going to close within Client Expectations without wasting the weekly open ticket review time.
With the introduction of the 4-pillars of Transformation, the % of tickets meeting Client Expectations without any coordination or management intervention jumps to the mid-80%.
How does Advanced Global know this to be true? For two reasons:
The seven-year journey** the founder of Advanced Global took reengineering and documenting a MSPs Standard Operating Procedures.
The documented results that 150+ MSPs enjoy, who have gone through Advanced Global’s Service Delivery Foundational Improvement program.
Pillar (Mindset Change) #1
** The Journey:
On day one of working for an MSP, my supervisor said to me, “We have been in business for 25 years, and we are still a Reactive, Break/Fix house. We are looking to you to take us to being a Proactive, Data-Driven, Service Delivery Operation.” - Adam Victor, 2010
This statement was based on my process reengineering experience in another industry. As I took the next step, there was no way I could apply process reengineering to all open tickets at once. So, to do my job, I started segmenting the open tickets into groups of tickets that were causing the most amount of pain for either the Clients or the MSP. The journey started with the Proactive Preventive Maintenance program which was experiencing 40% disruption and causing the Clients to question why we thought Preventive Maintenance was important and why we were selling it in the first place. The solution was to map the visit schedule in such a way that two designated Techs were available to engage as promised.
Once the Preventive Maintenance settled down to less than 7% disruption, and then only for Holidays and PTO, we focused on the next biggest pain point – Project Scheduling disruptions. These disruptions were caused by an “All-Hands-On-Deck” Critical Request SOP, which was very chaotic, stressful, and inefficient. The solution was to pre-position a Sr. Tech to take Critical Requests. This pre-position scheduling caused the Sr. Tech to be very inefficient for the days or week they were scheduled for Critical Request Response, but it made the rest of the Team so efficient that, the first week, Executive Management noticed what I was doing. It saved my job by making that week the highest utilization in the history of the company – this Transformation Stuff WORKS!!!
Any MSP worth their powder responds to and completes High Urgency and High Impact requests. This is what the industry is noted for, and it is what every MSP does well. What we do not do so well is the Low Priority stuff, as much of that drifts back to the request’s 1st birthday. However, the solution to the Low Priority requests was different from Critical and High Priority, mostly because it requires a different skill set and Client Expectation. For this reason, we need to approach the solution differently. I still remember the day we were called to a conference room to figure it out. After much discussion, we got nowhere. Finally, the President of the MSP turned to everyone in the room and said, “We are not finding a solution, and we do not understand the process reengineering Steve is doing, but whatever he says to do – DO IT!” As a side note, this was about sixty days after they were going to fire me for implementing the process reengineering techniques without their approval.
From that day on, we went through All the Open Tickets and Categorized them into 15 Workflows, each with their own SOP. (Note: Of the 15 this MSP needed, there are only 8 that apply to a Small MSP, and 11 to most all other MSPs.) So, Pillar (Mindset Change) #1 is to Categorize Client Requests into different Workflows and implement a different SOP for each.
Pillar (Mindset Change) #2
Also, during the 7-year journey, we learned four types of Client Requests must be scheduled. Scheduling Client Requests is almost non-existent in the MSP industry. Remember most MSPs have only one SOP – dump the ticket into the queue and ask the Techs to figure it out. Sometimes (very rarely compared to what is needed), the Techs realize this needs to be scheduled and then spend a significant amount of time catching up with and negotiating with the Client when the engagement is going to be scheduled for, or more times than not, they just drop in on their way home, hoping the front desk will let them in. This is Chaotic, Stressful, and inefficient. So, Pillar (Mindset Change) #2 is Time needs to be Allocated for the workload on the Techs, and there are 4 types of Client Requests that must be scheduled at the intake process, not after the Can (Client Request) has been kicked down the road a few times.
Pillar (Mindset Change) #3
In 2015, the MSP I was working for decided to create its first remote support team. Crazy right? All work for the past 30 years had been scheduled with an on-site visit. Frankly, it was scheduled on-site, but the Techs realized that most of the time they just needed to call the Client and engage remotely. What they did with all the excess non-used travel time – I have no idea, but the backlog of tickets was just as high as ever, so they were not repurposing the time for Client Engagements that we could tell. However, moving from scheduling on-site to using worklists (queue view or widgets) was not as easy as it sounds. How do you organize the worklists when so many things must be considered? For example: Urgency and Impact (incidents only), Client Reasonable Expectations (Service Requests), Contractual Obligations (MSAs), Relationship with the Client (T&M or MS), Where in the journey from Cradle to Grave was the Client’s request, etc. So, this is Pillar (Mindset Change) #3; we need the Techs’ worklist prioritized on a multi-dimensional level. It just so happens that this prioritization can easily be automated with AI.
Pillar (Mindset Change) #4
Autotask released the new Dashboard View UI in 2014. I was not an early adaptor. I liked my queue views. I liked having 18-24 instances of Autotask open on my desktop at any one moment. However, that all changed in September 2016 when Evan Welch (still a good friend today) asked me to build my first widget rather than use a Ticket Search filter.
I was immediately sold on dashboards. By using dashboards, I could have 12 (today it is 20) lists of tickets sorted differently at once. This eye-opening revelation opened my eyes to the benefit of the new (2-yr-old) Autotask Dashboard UI and replaced 12 of my instances of Autotask that I opened each morning. This is the next and last Pillar (Mindset Change) that every MSP needs to go through (#4) before they can make the leap to Operational Optimization.
Summary:
Without Transformation, a MSP cannot make the leap to Operational Optimization!
For an MSP to fully optimize their operation, they do not need automation (with or without AI), but what they need is Transformation in four significant Mindset Changes called the 4-Pillars of Transformation for MSPs:
Categorization of all Client Requests into separate Workflows with a different SOP for each workflow
Allocation of time for the workload on the Techs, including 4 types of Client Requests that must be scheduled in a calendar
Prioritization of the worklists on a multi-dimensional level and automated (without AI) so the Techs always know the Right Next Ticket
Organization of the Open Ticket views so in a single glance everyone can see everything they are responsible for and what is the Right Next Ticket
Oh, and if you are wondering about Scott, he was able to get a Gladiator Community Membership and has implemented much of what I talked about above.
For more information on how Advanced Global can reduce your 7–10-year journey to less than a year and a half:
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At Advanced Global MSP Consulting, we are committed to helping you grow your MSP business by improving your service delivery experience and eliminating Chaos. We understand the unique challenges you face in the MSP industry, including the mental health struggles that can come with the territory.
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Our most recent blog post on MSP Mental Health
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