It’s Not Just an ITIL® Thing
Key Takeaways:
ITIL® and Autotask: A Summary IT
All About Alerts
Problems Come in Two Flavors
Change Management – the Struggle is Real
Service Requests, a Giant Can of Worms
A Word on Incidents
Next Steps for Your MSP
Those of you reading this who have been in IT Service Delivery for many years may remember attending conferences and hearing about this awesome product called Autotask that was using something called the ITIL® approach to Managed Services.
Even though ITIL® (the IT Infrastructure Library) has been around since the 80’s, the 2007 and 2011 versions helped put the Service Delivery Focus on the Clients through the processes of the ITIL® service lifecycle.
ITIL® does a great job providing MSPs with an Urgency and Impact matrix. These matrixes direct us to move Critical Tickets to the top of the list and tell other clients that they are a Low Priority.
So, if all we did were respond to Incident requests, life would be easy. Unfortunately, when using Autotask to handle the non-reactive aspects of IT Service Management, we find that ITIL® doesn’t help us much.
To be fair, it is not totally all ITIL®’s fault.
Autotask has also dropped the ball. ITIL® has a whole Service Management library on what to do with all the other types of requests that MSPs receive - but Autotask has not incorporated those methodologies into the PSAutomation software, and for a good reason. The Autotask software is complicated enough without adding the complexity of ITIL®’s Service Management philosophies.
However, this leaves MSPs stuck in the middle and on their own, figuring out how to manage all the other types of Client requests we receive daily, weekly, and monthly. Fortunately, we can learn from those who have gone before us.
Both ITIL® and Autotask have given us a glimpse into what other types of requests our Clients will be sending us. Besides Incidents, the PSA software references Service Requests, Changes, Problems, and Alerts.
Alerts:
Today, alerts are needed and burdensome more than ever before. Not only are we receiving RMM alerts, but Backups, Auvik, AV, Liongard, and a whole host of other monitoring tools.
Think about this, if an MSP spends 5 minutes, per day, per Client just looking at Alerts (not engaging, just reviewing and assigning), it will take 1 FTE for every 60 Clients. That is a lot of person-hours just checking to see if the alert is real or not.
This is where scripting can become your best friend. A good scriptwriter can knock those alerts down by 75%, and it is worth every minute of their time. What a scriptwriter does once, saves the Monitoring Alert Tech every day of the week for the rest of the Client’s life, or until the vendor pushes out another maintenance release.
Problems:
Problems come in two flavors:
Wide-area outages that affect multiple Clients
Recurring incidents that impact a single Client more times than a wide-area outage affects multiple Clients
The solution is very different depending on the flavor. For Wide-Area outages, the answer is less technical and much more about the relationship. For most MSPs, the issue needs to be remediated by the ISP. The best Superior Service to the Client the MSP can deliver is to handle the interaction with the ISP and provide continuous updates for an hour or two after the ISP declares all clear.
For recurring incidents impacting a single Client, Root Cause Analysis (RCA) is in order. Once again, the time spent executing an RCA saves the MSP from more future remediation work than the RCA costs, not to mention maintaining the relationship with the Client.
Change Management:
I have struggled with Change Management in Autotask. Working for TD Bank, like working for any financial institution, we had tight Change Management controls, including a Change Management Board that had to approve all Network Changes and never approved a Change request without a roll-back plan.
However, in the MSP world, we can’t even get a Client to respond when we are waiting for them, let alone participate in a change management process. A Client recently told me that they had been taken to task by one of their Clients over the Mean Time To Resolve (MTTR) numbers. The MSP responded with the Non-Waiting Client time vs. the Waiting Client time. Their Client changed their tune and promised to do a better job. If this had been a Change Management Approval situation, the product would be EoL before the approval was given.
Service Requests:
From an Autotask point of view, Service Requests are a giant can of worms. There is no such thing as “a” service request in the MSP world. We have at least six of them not including the hundreds of poorly defined variations an MSP deals with every day.
With ITIL®’s Urgency and Impact matrix for Incidents, we have clear definitions of the 5 types of Incidents. Thanks to our MSA agreements, we have clear definitions of the expected response rate for each type of Incident, but for Service Requests, we have none.
This is where 90% of the chaos reigns in the MSP’s Service Delivery Operation. If there is any one place an MSP needs a Service Delivery Gladiator to divide and conquer and bring order to the chaos, it is in the area of “Service Request” management.
Autotask gives us priorities to divide Incidents into different workflows. None of that exists for Service Requests. Autotask gives us the SLA Automation to order the Incident tickets as to which ones should be worked on next. None of that exists for Service Requests.
And just to add to the headache, Autotask gives us Default Service Desk Contracts. That means Recurring Service Contracts are added to all tickets, Incident and Service Request tickets, and we need to figure out how to exclude the Moves/Adds/Changes along with the rest of the Service Requests.
While Autotask does provide a high level of customization and configuration options, the one thing we cannot do is re-write the software. So, the best we can do is build out the Incident Management PSAutomation to accommodate Service Requests.
By this, we mean to:
First expand the list of Priorities to include Service Request workflows
Then expand the list of SLAs to include Service Request scheduling objectives
Followed by leveraging Exclusion Sets ensures the Client is invoiced properly
Incidents:
Anything we would say about Incidents is not worth the paper we write on. If there is one thing MSPs are masters at, it is Break/Fix. Enough said.
Conclusion:
Hopefully, you now have a better understanding where ITIL® and Autotask work hand in hand to make every MSP’s life better. Need a hand from an expert team like Advanced Global to get a handle on Service Requests within the PSA software? We’re only an email away at Info@AGMSPCoaching.com.
The elephant in the room:
Who is Advanced Global, and why should we listen to them?
Recently someone we’ve been in communication with since DattoCon 2018, who was faithfully reading our articles, commented that up until a few months ago, “I really did not know what Advanced Global does.” So here are a few bullet points to let anyone interested know who we are and what we do:
1) We Are – the Autotask Global Service Delivery Authority
2) We Help – MSPs thrive
3) We Solve – Service Delivery issues, inefficiencies, and challenges by making sure:
a. techs know what to work on next
b. someone is managing all open tickets and driving them to completion
c. the staffing levels are correct, and the workload is balanced
d. Real-Time Time Entry is a cultural habit
e. the Client has a great client experience
f. profit is maximized
g. Autotask is being fully leveraged
h. the historical data that is in the Autotask software is accessible to benchmark, track & USE effectively
i. the Service Delivery operations can scale
j. projects are completed On-Time and On-Budget
k. the company can grow
l. MSPs know what they don’t know
4) Our Tools:
a. Autotask “Best in Class” standard build
b. Our MSP robust Service Delivery SOP library
c. Advanced Autotask Live Reports
d. Expertise in providing a transformational educational experience
Note: We are not philosophers; we are doers with 31+ years of Service Delivery experience, bringing real Service Delivery Improvement change, profitability, and Best in Class performance.
We start by offering a FREE No-Obligation PSA Configuration Evaluation