MSP Owners are the Reason Most Techs Only Work 50% of the Time!
Key Takeaways:
It’s all on the Owner
But why is it the Owner’s fault, anyway?
Techs need 4 things to do their job
A great intake process
Ditch the Client-facing Non-Billable work
A Ticket Management tool to organize the day
Positive collaborative coaching/mentoring processes
Transform from Chaos to Zen: a Quick Summary
Yes, you read that right: The average tech is only working 50% of the time.
Now, whose fault is that?
The Owner’s fault.
Am I sure? Yes.
Am I really sure? Yes.
Prove it, you say?
The proof is in the pudding, as they say…We have been doing Free No-Obligation PSA Configurations for several years now. 132 of them, to be exact. For 130 of them, the Techs were working less than 50% of the time. There’s your proof.
I imagine your next question is WHY? And why is it the Owner’s fault?
Simply put, if your Techs are not contributing to the bottom line 80-85% of the Time, it is pretty obvious that it’s the Owner who is dropping the ball.
As President Harry Truman used to say, “The buck stops here.”
For Techs to do their job as expected, they need these four crucial things:
A great intake process that creates a quality ticket
All Client-Facing non-billable work removed from their task list
A ticket management tool that automatically organizes their workday
Positive collaborative coaching/mentoring processes
Here is what they look like when done right:
A great intake process that creates a quality ticket
80% of the Service Delivery Chaos can be resolved by having a top-notch intake process. We have seen over and over that if the intake process is fixed, the rest of the requested journey from New to Complete organically improves and starts meeting expectations.
What the MSP needs is an intake process that creates tickets with all the information needed to begin the engagement and properly coded to flow through the Service Delivery operation effortlessly.
Without this triage process in place, too much of the Techs’ time is wasted:
Chasing down the information
Engaging at the wrong place in the New to Completion journey, only then disengaging without any real work being done
Sending requests back for rework by others, or escalating to someone who has availability – hopefully with the right skillset.
All Client-Facing non-billable work removed from their task list
Why use a Lamborghini to go to the grocery store.? Yes, it feeds your ego, but getting more than one bag of groceries in a two-seat high-performance sports car is a pain in the neck.
Besides, who would want broken eggs all over the interior as you leave the parking lot like you’re racing for a million dollars? (of course, the ice cream does get to your freezer faster, if the police do not notice you).
The same goes for your Service Delivery Team. You have heavily invested in hiring smart, capable Techs and then invested even more in their career growth. Now you task them with chasing parts, vendors, or leaving VM with the Clients?
The data in Autotask clearly shows that 10% of the Techs’ time is non-billable work. Removing this non-billable work from three or more Techs’ plates will cover the cost of hiring a non-billable person. This person will not only do the non-billable work but also to take ownership of all open tickets, driving them from New to Completion.
One of the most important functions of a non-billable person would be maintaining the Techs’ dashboards, so they always know what to work on next – in other words, the e-paperwork that Techs do not do for themselves.
A Ticket Management tool that automatically organizes their workday
Speaking of dashboards, Autotask became a superior PSAutomation tool compared to the rest with the introduction of dashboards in 2014. For the first time, all tickets a Tech was responsible for could be organized into separate widgets, so they were aware of all their responsibilities. This order helps them to know what to work on next.
Queue views, My Task and Tickets, Worklists, etc., do a poor (inefficient) job of communicating to the Techs what to work on next. There are too many tickets not under SLA management and too many tickets off their radar.
What a Tech needs are at least three lists of tickets ordered in three different ways, all in a single glance view. The three primary lists of tickets are:
Tickets ready to be engaged on at will, ordered by Next SLA Event Due Date
Tickets scheduled to engage with a Client at a certain date and time, ordered by Start Date/Time
Tickets in waiting status, ordered by last activity due date
This way, the Tech knows what they can work on at will until they are scheduled to work with a Client directly. And when they run out of work (which if you have a non-billable Employee managing their dashboards should never happen), then they have time to chase Clients who have not responded in the last two days.
Positive collaborative coaching/mentoring processes
So far, we have been talking about what it takes to create a great efficient Service Delivery working environment…an environment that is necessary before you can hold the Techs accountable to meet internal and external expectations.
It would be great once an Owner provides an environment that includes:
A great intake process that creates a quality ticket
All Client-Facing non-billable work removed from their task list
A ticket management tool that automatically organizes their workday
…Then the Techs would naturally become a high-performing team, but we are talking about herding cats Techs at the end of the day.
For Techs to reach peak performance (Resource Utilization > 80%, SLAs > 95%, Mean Time To Resolve < 2 Business Days, and Reactive Hours per Endpoint per Month < .25), it still takes someone to hold them accountable. Holding them accountable does not need to be a head bashing, finger-pointing, he said/she said exercise full of emotion and conflict.
Think of Autotask Advanced Live Reports as a neutral mediator in the room. It is not you who is accusing the Techs of sluffing it off; it is the report.
You are there to help them, mentor them, and coach them to get the report to quit throwing them under the bus.
Remember Pearson’s Law: “When performance is measured, performance improves.” And those words are never truer than when it comes to holding Techs accountable.
Summary:
Moving the Service Delivery Team from a reactive, break/fix operation to a proactive, data-driven one is possible. This move will change the working environment from Chaos to Zen. Moving from Chaos to Zen has huge returns for the MSPs bottom-line ($100K per Tech per Year) and Client Experience (Churn cut in half).
All of this is possible, and it is the Owners responsibility to make it happen!
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:
We Are – the Autotask Global Service Delivery Authority
We Help – MSPs thrive
We Solve – Service Delivery issues, inefficiencies, and challenges by making sure:
techs know what to work on next
someone is managing all open tickets and driving them to completion
the staffing levels are correct, and the workload is balanced
Real-Time Time Entry is a cultural habit
the Client has a great client experience
profit is maximized
Autotask is being fully leveraged
the historical data that is in the Autotask software is accessible to benchmark, track & USE effectively
the Service Delivery operations can scale
projects are completed On-Time and On-Budget
the company can grow
MSPs know what they don’t know
Our Tools:
Autotask “Best in Class” standard build
Our MSP robust Service Delivery SOP library
Advanced Autotask Live Reports
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
Steve & Co