Enterprise Fuel, Part 4: Efficiency is Enterprise Fuel
BY IT GLUE | August 13, 2020
Parkinson’s Law holds that “work expands to fill the time allotted,” and was written with bureaucrats in mind. Yet, we find that this often holds true even in a corporate setting. Give somebody until the end of the week to do something and they’ll find themselves quite busy all week, and then miraculously, the time to complete the task will appear on Friday afternoon.
If you’re not interested in expanding your business, there’s nothing wrong with that scenario. After all, the work was done on time. But if you’re an owner or a leader in an MSP, you might think differently about Parkinson’s Law. You might see that increasing the efficiency of your team creates time that can be used for other pursuits. Growth-oriented pursuits. Consider the following couple of scenarios.
Scenario #1
In the first scenario, you’re a very small MSP, maybe just you, or you and a couple of other people. If you want to grow the business, you’re probably finding that time is a huge constraint, especially if you’re working tickets and projects on one hand, and trying to do sales and marketing on the other. You don’t even like sales, and have little expertise in marketing, so those things get pushed to the side. And you never grow.
Scenario #2
In the second scenario, your MSP is a little bigger. You actually want to grow but again run into constraints. This time it’s finding good technical talent. If your best people are working tickets and small projects, then they aren’t able to onboard new clients, handle major projects or integrate new acquisitions.
But if you build more efficiency throughout all levels of your organization, you can shift work around. If a Tier 1 is more efficient on the basic service desk stuff, then you might be able to train a junior tech to do more senior work. And if more complex tasks become easier to do, your existing senior talent offload those tasks in order to take on bigger projects.
Documentation is Where it All Starts
Either way, creating greater efficiency, especially in routine tasks, frees up some of your scarce resources to take on whatever work you want – including work that directly fuels growth.
None of this works, however, if you can’t get out of those first basic stages. As a small shop, you need to find money to pay for a sales professional sooner rather than later. That comes from needing fewer technical staff members. In a larger operation, your senior technical talent might be the constraint on growth, but again efficiency has the ability to free up their time.
Documentation isn’t the only way to promote greater efficiency in your MSP. But it does work, especially when you document the right way.
The reason IT Glue works isn’t just because you have centralized, structured documentation. That’s only part of it. IT Glue works because it’s easy, and facilitates building a culture of documentation. With any documentation system you get out of it what you put into it, so you want a documentation system that techs will actually want to use.
That’s what IT Glue does that nobody else can. Documentation that’s easy to use, that makes techs’ lives easier, and that removes barriers to getting work done. That’s how IT Glue becomes enterprise fuel for your MSP.
