What’s your documentation maturity level? MSPs with the highest level of documentation maturity are leveraging the power of documentation to eliminate waste in all areas of their company -- not just smashing routine tickets. Read on to find out how to leverage your documentation to enhance the HR and administration functions at your MSP.
Contacts
Your clients are documented in your PSA and your documentation platform, but what about all of the other contacts for your organization, such as employees, vendors, and key industry contacts. These people are all important assets to your business. After all, who you know is just as important as what you know. If you do not have all of your contacts systematically documented, you run the risk of losing those contacts when someone leaves your company. For your employees, you can also link the contact information you have on file with the hardware you’ve given them, the software licenses they have, and even what passwords they have access to. The better this information is documented, the lower your risk.
Locations
Locations are a great way to structure information. Your office, even if you only have one, is full of hardware components. If you link up the locations - each room can be its own location - with the people and hardware that are supposed to be in that location, you will have better visibility as to how your organization is laid out. Not only does this lower risk, but it provides senior management with full transparency over where there assets are, who has access to them, and of course you’ll log the warranty information as well.
Vendors and External Contacts
Last year, during that quiet week between Christmas and New Year’s, the coffee machine at IT Glue broke. There were only a handful of us in the office, and none of us knew who to call to have it fixed. All those people were away on holiday. All the vendor information is documented - somewhere it is written down who to call to fix the coffee machine - but in this case not everybody knew where to find that information. The lesson is that even if the people who normally deal with a vendor or external contact have documented that information, one day they might not be around to access the documentation. Centralized storage of documentation means that critical information is no longer siloed. And if you think the coffee machine isn’t critical information, you were not here that day.
Roles and SOPs
Every HR department has roles matched with job descriptions and linked to the people who fill them. But as roles evolve, it can become difficult to track what exactly each person does within the organization, which is important information for compensation and performance evaluation. But what if your documentation platform could link roles with the SOPs critical to performing those roles? Not only would that allow the person filling each role to have access at their fingertips of each SOP they need, but HR would have visibility when responsibilities change for a given role. All the licenses, reporting relationships, SOPs and external contacts associated with this role are linked to the role, which is then linked to the individual filling the role.
Templates and Shared Documents
Document the templates you use templates for basic scripts - interviewing for different types of positions, for example. Or new hire onboarding programs. Create a repository for shared SOPs covering everything from booking meeting rooms to filing expense reports. Operating manuals can be uploaded so that anyone in the company can reference them. Everything is self-serve when HR and Administration are fully leveraging the power of documentation.
Chances are pretty good that this information already exists...somewhere. But you know how it is. That information is stored across multiple platforms. Some people know where some of it is, some people where most of it is, but that still means a lot of wasted time asking questions, and poking around trying to find things. It’s not just techs who waste a lot of time looking for information - time waste is a plague common to most workers.
To learn more about how IT Glue can help your entire staff become more efficient, schedule a demo today.
Joshua Oakes is a content writer at IT Glue, which develops documentation software for MSPs. Read all IT Glue blogs here.
