Outsourcing IT support to a Managed Service Provider (MSP) can help your business stay up-to-date with the latest technology and remain competitive in today’s challenging business environment. What’s more, it can do all this while cutting your in-house IT support costs and freeing up your technical staff for mission critical tasks.
Once you commit to outsourcing IT support you will need to plan ahead to make the transition as smooth as possible. While your chosen MSP will bring their own expertise to this transition – this is what you hire them for, after all – you can still help them help you.
Here are five suggestions on how to successfully outsource your business IT support.
Every business structure is unique – from your sales processes and supplier networks to your staff organisation and customer relations – and your IT support needs will reflect this. So, when you engage an MSP to outsource IT support, you should make sure that they know exactly how your business works and what your IT needs are. In order to ensure the best service possible, you will need to work closely with them and clearly communicate your goals.
This will mean sharing your business strategy, your plans for future growth, and any current IT weaknesses and competitive threats. Your MSP’s role is to provide you with the best IT support tailored to your business needs, as well as to proactively advise you on possible tech innovations that can help your business achieve its goals. They can only do this if you treat them as an integral partner in your business plans.
When looking for a Managed Service Provider to partner with, you should look for the most cost-effective service provider, but not necessarily the cheapest. This means an MSP that can provide you with the best service at the best possible price, and not simply the lowest-priced option.
You don’t need an MSP that provides the bare minimum of outsourced IT support, but rather one that proactively brings ongoing value to your business, and actively supports customer satisfaction and revenue growth. Keep this at the forefront of your mind when you select an MSP partner.
You should treat the transition from in-house to outsourced IT support as a mission-critical task. A poor implementation process could seriously disrupt your business operations, not to mention inconvenience your own clients.
With this in mind, it is important that you do not delegate the task of overseeing the transition to a junior office manager or receptionist, who will then have to act as a go-between to get the job done. This adds unnecessary links to the chain, and fosters miscommunication and error.
Instead, you need your Managed Service Provider to work directly with the key stakeholders within your business. These are the senior staff who fully understand your business strategy and IT needs, and are familiar with the day-to-day operation of your business. They will bring their own expertise and authority to the outsourcing transition, and will also help bring your entire staff on board. They’re busy people of course, but if you prioritise the transition, then they will ensure it runs as smoothly and as efficiently as possible.
As with any transition in business, one of the biggest challenges with outsourcing IT support can be in helping your staff manage the organisational change. This can be especially challenging where formerly in-house expertise is being outsourced.
You will probably have at least one member of staff who is involved in managing your IT services, and they should be one of your key stakeholders engaged in managing the outsourcing transition. One of the biggest difficulties in managing that transition can come about when your staff take a defensive position and start second-guessing and overruling the MSP team. This can be highly disruptive, leading to poor outcomes, and wasted time and resources.
As you’re paying for the professional services of an MSP, you should give them the trust to make the changes they deem necessary, obviously with input and final authority from your key stakeholders. This will provide the most cost effective and efficient IT support possible.
You should make clear to your staff that they need to listen to and trust the experts. This can be a difficult balancing act, as you will need to do this while still empowering your team. Change management is a delicate skill, but one certainly worth mastering.
Clear, productive, two-way communication is key to any successful business relationship, especially so when outsourcing IT support. A professional MSP will implement the appropriate channels to make sure any client and/or staff feedback reaches the right people in a transparent and timely manner. Reciprocal communication is essential here and you will need to keep all channels open and productive.
To start off on the right foot, you can agree a policy with your Managed Service Provider that sets out your communication expectations during the outsourcing transition, as well as outlining what information needs to be communicated in both directions. Your MSP may be offsite, but they still need to be integrated with your organisation.
In today’s competitive world, a professionally-managed IT support service is much more than just an outsourced call centre. The main takeaway is to think of your MSP as an integral part of your own business structure. The key to successful integration is a productive and proactive attitude towards collaboration. With both your in-house team and your outsourcing partners working as a unified whole, and integrating their day-to-day working relations, you will be giving your business the best chance of success. Work as a team with your MSP and your business will see the benefits for years to come.
I recently threw a question out to a group of my professional peers, asking them what they saw as the benefits of aligning IT strategy with business strategy.
The responses I received were nothing short of exceptional. It reinforced for me (yet again) what an insightful, intelligent and progressive professional community I have the good fortune to be part of.
Respondents represented a diverse range of positions including CEOs, founders, self-employed and employees, with an equally diverse range of industries represented, including IT, retail, professional services, medical and creative industries.
Even though everyone brought their own unique perspective to the discussion it was interesting to see that responses could be classed easily within three main categories.
Related: Three Crucial Elements for your IT Strategy
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, computers were an indulgent option when running a business. Computers were expensive, had limited functionality and, to many, provided limited value beyond what traditional methods had done. Despite this, the march towards a technology-enabled future proceeded, lead by finance departments looking for efficiencies promised by so called ‘spreadsheet’ software.
Fast forward to today and you would be hard pressed to find a business not dependent on IT in some way or another. These days IT is a given in pretty much every element of business, from finance to marketing, production, design, customer service and all points in between.
Given this universal adoption, simply ‘using’ IT these days is no longer enough to gain advantage, but is now mere table stakes to stay in the game. So does that mean that technology no longer has any competitive advantage to offer? Quite the contrary. However to gain that advantage IT can no longer be considered an operational issue, but must be given a seat at the board table and aligned strongly with the overall business strategy.
In the not too distant past, being in ‘the cloud’ was a buzz word, but now a significant amount of technology used in businesses is cloud based.
Looking forward, businesses of all sizes and industries seem to be shifting their focus to data. Using business data to make informed decisions is actually quite a recent phenomenon. Where managers once relied upon ‘gut feel’ to chart their course, there are now extensive opportunities to gather, store, organise and utilise information from all sorts of sources to improve organisational agility and effectiveness.
So, essentially, there’s no competitive advantage in merely ‘using’ technology these days, but in using it strategically in alignment with the overall business goals.
Another benefit of aligning IT strategies with business goals is to focus the stakeholders on the objectives of the business. Then the IT systems can be used effectively to carry out those business goals.
It sounds simple enough, but first you need to be clear on what the business strategy is and clearly communicate this strategy with the people in your organisation, including your IT department, so they understand the core business goals and can work towards them. It’s often assumed that an organisation already has, and actively executes a strategic plan, but unfortunately this isn’t always the case.
Aligning IT strategy with business goals helps guide and inform decision making, and ensures that everyone is working towards the same goals and are on the same page. IT systems that are selected and implemented in line with an organisation’s strategic plan are more likely to be valuable, well used tools. A team is more likely to be on board with implementation and training on the new technology if they understand how the IT systems fit in with the business goals.
Focusing IT efforts towards meeting data-driven business objectives will ensure that the whole business believes in the value of IT in achieving the underlying strategic course of the organisation. These days, there are more and more tools available to help harness the power of data from multiple sources into making informed decisions about the direction of the business.
In the Facebook age and with the advent of increased scrutiny from government and regulatory bodies, businesses of all sizes need to be more conscious of the way that they manage and secure sensitive information. Whilst there is some fantastic technology to assist businesses to manage their security, the reality is that alignment of business processes and competently trained staff operating in a culture of awareness is essential in realising the objective of running a secure business.
Ultimately, it’s very much a two way street. Not only is it about your IT being responsive and understanding the needs of your business, but aligning your IT and business objectives also means that you are ensuring that the way in which risks and opportunities around technology are better managed in the business.
Especially in smaller organisations, resources will always be limited, so aligning IT with business strategy means that resources are being used most effectively.
Using the technology that aligns with business goals means that efficiencies can be achieved, which in turn keeps costs to a minimum.
Sometimes with technology, it’s easy to get swept up in the latest shiny gadgets and trends. And while it might be fun to own the latest iPhone, it may not be a necessary tool for stakeholders to achieve their goals. There will also be areas where you may not want to invest in new technologies because it would be undesirable due to high risks, costs or even fragmentation of your data or systems.
If the IT goals are aligned with the business goals, it allows the business to be proactive and intentional with the IT spend and therefore reduce unnecessary costs that come from being at the whim of trends.
There are many benefits to aligning your business’ IT strategy with its business goals, but they can largely be categorised into three areas. In order to remain competitive, to ensure that all stakeholders are working towards the same goals, and to maximise the value from limited resources, it’s worthwhile for business and IT strategies to be aligned. Technology for the sake of technology is of no benefit to anyone, however that doesn’t mean IT should limit its role to processing work orders and printing labels. If IT is providing technology leadership and aligning with the goals of the organisation, that is where the true power of IT will be found in the business.
Whether you are a Digital Transformation powerhouse, or you provide the best Tree Lopping services in Brisbane, technology is integral to the success of your organisation. This is especially true for small to medium businesses where margins can be thin, and the market competitive. To remain agile it’s critical to extract the most out of your technology. One way to do so is to engage the right Managed Service Provider (MSP) to provide outsourced IT support and services.
A Managed Service Provider is a company that gives organisations the capability to outsource their IT service delivery requirements. In other words, an MSP is essentially your IT department. If something breaks, they are on the other end of the phone to make things work again. A good MSP will also actively keep an eye on all systems, proactively resolving issues before they even impact business.
A great MSP will invest the time to learn your business deeply enough to make recommendations and actively partner with you on enabling your team to achieve their goals.
All businesses need IT support to some degree. These days it’s just part and parcel of doing business. Some organisations may be able to get by doing their own IT support, or perhaps only calling on an IT expert from time to time when things really get out of hand. But irrespective of how you currently manage your IT, at what point is it time to level up and engage with an MSP?
Here are some common signs it might be time to investigate whether engaging an MSP would be valuable for your business.
It’s probably fair to say that there are many businesses operating with one person wearing a multitude of hats, one being the “IT guy”. The problem with this is that, while this person is probably more tech savvy than the average bear they are probably not up to date with the latest IT developments. It’s also probably a significant challenge for this busy person to balance the IT needs of the organisation whilst also remaining productive at their core job. Ultimately this leads to IT only receiving reactive attention when absolutely necessary, and a clear loss of focus and productivity from the lucky person.
You could hire a dedicated IT person (which is undoubtedly a better option than folding IT responsibilities into an existing role within the organisation), but not only is this a significant investment, what if your IT person gets sick or needs to take leave? Add to this the challenges of not only recruiting, but supporting, management and developing a lone IT staff member, and this option can often prove a poor investment.
Instead of hiring your own in-house IT staff, you could consider using an MSP who can give you the benefits of a full IT department at a fraction of the cost. Your employees can focus on your core mission and you can rest easy knowing that your IT demands are being professionally managed.
When the systems we use on a daily basis break down, business owners very quickly realise that the technology powering their business is incredibly complex. If the technology under the bonnet in your business is constantly experiencing problems, there is a good chance that this is significantly impacting your staff happiness, customers experience and of course your bottom line.
Partnering with a quality MSP can take you from a reactive, painful break-fix cycle to a situation where you are empowered to plan your IT Strategy and benefit from reduced maintenance and replacement costs. A quality MSP will take a proactive approach to the maintenance, patching and monitoring of your technology and make business-focused recommendations on how to improve the business through technology (rather than selling you the latest technology, with its relevance to the business as an afterthought). Proactive is always a better, more economical option than being reactive.
It can be challenging to budget effectively for your IT requirements. Some months you might have to replace a laptop, while others may see you need to stump up for a new server or address a critical security incident that needs to be dealt with immediately. This is an even harder task for smaller businesses.
The ability to budget your IT services on a monthly basis makes planning how to spend your valuable dollars much easier. As well as more predictable costs for your services, your systems are actually kept in better working order and will last longer with professional programmed maintenance. The right MSP will be able to work with you to understand your business requirements and stabilise your IT spend over the medium term with forward planning and budgeting.
Each Managed IT service provider will price their IT support contracts differently, however there are some common approaches that most MSP’s work with.
This is a tried and true pricing model where customers are billed a predictable flat fee for the monitoring and maintenance of specific devices, such as laptop and desktop computers, servers and even mobile devices. The predictability and flexibility of this model is attractive to both customers as well as the MSP. Potential drawbacks could be in situations where customer organisations may have numerous devices used by the same employee.
The per-user pricing model is similar to the per-device pricing model, with the difference being that the flat fee is billed per end user per month and covers support for all devices used by each end user.
The premise of the tiered managed service provider model is to build bundled packages of services, starting from a basic package and becoming increasingly more expensive based on providing more comprehensive services. Some companies use names like Bronze, Silver and Gold for each level.
As an example, a “Bronze” managed services package may include basic phone and remote support for an entry-level price. Bumping up to the higher priced “Silver” desktop managed services package, which may include proactive patch management and scheduled on-site visits, and the “Gold” package may include around the clock emergency after-hours support.
Sometimes referred to as “cake” pricing (whereby you buy the entire cake, rather than the individual components of eggs, flour and icing) this model provides a comprehensive service and the MSP essentially becomes the outsourced IT department of the business. The comprehensive suite of services is certainly valuable to the customer because it provides specialist industry experience and advice, but it doesn’t require the business owner to commit to their own permanent IT department when the business environment and their needs evolve over time.
Before embarking on employing the services of a Managed Service Provider, an agreement will generally be drawn up to protect the client and the MSP and ensure clear communication between the stakeholders.
Most MSP agreements will generally answer the following questions:
Your Managed Service Provider should be on top of all technological aspects of your infrastructure. They should be able to discern and have a record of which updates need to be implemented, and what hardware needs to be replaced when necessary. They should also have systems in place that ensure the technicians looking after your infrastructure are kept up to date and informed.
Your Managed Service Provider should be consistently evaluating the health of your infrastructure, ensuring that all systems are appropriately patched and secured, validating system utilization, recommending changes and upgrades to software and hardware when needed. They should be offering constant reviews on the overall status of your IT operations to ensure you are match fit. The true value of your MSP will be recognised not only by your technology being maintained at optimal performance and stability, but in enabling and empowering you to focus on your own core business and what really matters.
Your Managed Service Provider should want to develop a strategic partnership with your organisation to ensure long term success for your business. An MSP should always have a top-level view of your entire IT infrastructure and how it relates to the operation of your business. In addition, your MSP should be able to respond and react to changing business conditions, and provide consultative advice to IT priorities and challenges that can affect your business even if they’re not currently responsible for it.
In short, a strategic partnership with a quality Managed Service Provider should enable you to plan and budget for your main IT expenses, rather than falling into a costly and unpredictable break-fix cycle. When you find the right MSP to suit your business needs, you will be able to focus on your core business, confident that your IT systems are running smoothly and proactively managed.
It’s been an amazing few years at Grassroots IT, not least of all because of the international growth that we’ve experienced both with our clients and our team. If you had have asked me five years ago whether Grassroots IT would one day not only be supporting multinational clients, but have our own workforce spread across three countries, I would have replied with “Maybe in 20 years”. Yet here we are, doing just that.
It turns out that running a geographically and culturally diverse team can be pretty rewarding but, like anything in business, it’s not without its challenges. Issues such as organisational culture, HR and, of course, legal and accounting matters all become so much more important when working with a diverse team. The good news is that there are some great resources available to help navigate these areas successfully.
Day to day operational activities also need careful attention to ensure that staff can operate effectively. Simply transferring a phone call to a colleague can become an entirely different proposition when that colleague is in a different timezone. Again, there is good news with a number of technology tools available to help.
Read on as we run through a selection of the tools that we use at Grassroots IT to let our diverse staff effectively support our clients across multiple countries and timezones.
Voice over IP (VoIP) is a technology that lets us run our phones over network and internet connections, rather than traditional phone lines. Using VoIP means that we’re not physically constrained to a particular location the way that we would be with traditional phone lines, as well as having some great features that are either hard or expensive to come by with traditional telephony.
Here are some examples of how we are using this to our advantage:
We haven’t done a direct comparison of our call costs using VoIP vs using traditional telephony, so I can’t comment on that, however I can say that we could not operate the way we do without the unique flexibility that VoIP provides.
Video calls in Microsoft Teams (a core part of Microsoft Office 365) are hands down our preferred way of communicating between team members. When we can’t physically be together in the same room, a video call is the next best thing. There’s so much unspoken context and communication that simply gets lost in email, chat and even voice calls that you can still convey via video. We have our daily huddles across countries using Teams, and making a video call is our preferred channel for one on one, or multi-party discussions.
Teams is also an excellent chat platform for those quick, sharp questions and answers that don’t need a full blown conversation. We have a number of different channels within Teams covering range of topics such as one for helpdesk, one for the leadership team, and one for sharing the fun personal projects and hobbies we each enjoy.
Even though we find ourselves using fewer documents, such as Word and Excel files, they are still an important part of our business, and often need to be accessible to staff in multiple locations, as well as remotely from home or a client site. Traditionally we have used a shared folder (which we called our G Drive) on one of our servers, which remote staff would need to access via a VPN. These days with far more powerful and flexible options available, we no longer have a G drive at all.
Microsoft SharePoint is our preferred method of file storage and sharing, as well as for hosting our intranet with sections for HR, Service Delivery and Projects. SharePoint also integrates perfectly with Microsoft Teams, meaning that a lot of the time we don’t even have to leave the excellent Teams application to access our SharePoint content.
You may have noticed a common thread running through all of these systems that we rely on – namely that they all support, at their core, the two concepts of Cloud and Mobility. The reality is that cloud and mobile friendly applications are now the norm (for very good reason), and if you’re not embracing this yet in your business, you can be confident that your clients and competitors are. In our case these solutions have enabled our business to evolve in directions that only a few years ago would have been very challenging and expensive.
“Our strategy is to provide a superior service and charge more than the competition does.”
“Our strategy is cost based…we can service the client cheaper than our competitors can.”
“We use the shotgun strategy. It works well for us.”
“Our strategy is to not grow too fast.”
We have all heard these strategy statements, or ones like them. There are many more where they come from and a significant similarity between them is that none are a strategy on its own.
The point here is that each statement may address a key business function or decision but if it is pursued in isolation or is over emphasised, it may lead to gaps or weaknesses in other areas of the business plan. Business strategists (owners, managers and entrepreneurs) must have an integrated, overarching concept of how the business will achieve its objectives – a strategy. It may seem as though strategy is something for the ‘big corporates’ to worry about, but strategy is just as important for small and medium enterprises – to channel the passion and drive that most small business owners have into positive results.
It is interesting that the word ‘strategy’ is derived from the Greek ‘strategos, or the art of the General’. An important link here is that the General(s) referred to, similar to business leaders, had to orchestrate multiple battles on multiple fronts over extended time frames. They had to resource their army then ensure that all components of their forces were where they had to be, when they had to be, doing what they had to do and complementing each other. Hannibal’s decision to use elephants to cross the alps was not his whole strategy…it was a small part of it.
So where to for help? A search for ‘business strategy’ books on Amazon.com this week resulted in 13,246 listings. Needless to say there is no shortage of reading material available on the subject. Getting straight to the point, an excellent article on the subject is by respected authors Hambrick & Frederickson (2001) who argue that a comprehensive business strategy addresses five elements.
1. ARENAS: Where will we compete?
2. VEHICLES: How will we get there?
3. DIFFERENTIATORS: How will we win?
3. STAGING: What will our speed and sequence be?
4. ECONOMIC LOGIC: How should we obtain our returns?
To illustrate their model, Hambrick & Frederickson map out the strategy of an international furniture retailer. Can you guess who it is?
ARENAS: Where will we compete?
VEHICLES: How will we get there?
DIFFERENTIATORS: How will we win?
STAGING: What will our speed and sequence be?
ECONOMIC LOGIC: How should we obtain our returns?
I’m sure it will come as no surprise to know that it will take more than answering questions off the top of your head to develop a good strategy. A robust strategy will require the investment of considerable time and effort in analysing your competitors, industry, market trends and customer needs as well as your own capabilities and capacity.
For those of you who would like to test the quality of their strategy Hambrick & Frederickson offer six evaluation criteria:
Whether you develop your strategy formally or informally, there is no doubt that it will be better for considering each of the five elements.
Good luck.
Reference:
Hambrick, D.C. & Frederickson. J. W., 2001, ‘Are you sure you have a strategy?’, Academy of Management Executive, 1 October, pp. 48-59.
Grassroots IT is a managed service provider, specialising in Microsoft solutions. Our extensive IT expertise stems from our experience in collaborating with diverse clients across an array of industries and organisational levels.
