Think of a routine task that your MSP performs. Now ask your techs how they do it. Chances are pretty good that they don’t all execute the task the exact same way. This means that some are more efficient than others. To eliminate waste and ensure consistent service delivery, you’ll need to find the best process, and have everybody follow it, each time.
Become More Scalable
Why is it so important to focus on consistent and efficient processes? Because process is how your company succeeds. It’s easy to get lost in the long list of goals and deadlines you have to meet. But process will help make that work more efficient, freeing up more time for other tasks, like growing your business.
Consistent and efficient processes allow you to delegate tasks to other people who in turn need less guidance to complete them. To do this, documentation is essential. Documentation provides the roadmap for your processes and allows everyone in the office to be on the same page with the same capabilities to complete tasks. Without it, your processes stand little chance of being implemented. Consider creating a hierarchy of processes to document that looks like this:
- Your most routine processes
- Relatively routine and very complex processes
- Processes that are currently done inconsistently
It’s important to note that your documentation has to be strategic. Remember, the end goal here is to eliminate wasted time; so that’s how you can determine which processes to document first. Use this hierarchy to identify the processes where consistency will give you the biggest time savings.
Case Study: Onboarding a New Tech
Consider the processes involving onboarding new employees. Training and getting them up to speed can involve a lot of tedious tasks and some trial and error. If you have your processes optimized and written down where they can easily be retrieved, a new hire will become more efficient, more quickly.
Over half of MSPs report that it takes more than 3 months for a new tech to get to 80% efficiency. That’s not including all the time spent by your more experienced techs helping the new person. With documented processes, you can cut that time frame in half, and reduce the amount of time your senior techs are spending on training. That’s thousands of dollars in efficiency gains, just from having your best processes documented and accessible.
As they say, it’s about the journey and not the destination. By creating good processes, the journey becomes simpler and more efficient, and your final destination will have a higher reward. The only trick? You have to focus on the process first.
Learn More: To find out more about how you can start documenting your processes better using IT Glue, click here to schedule a demo.
Ashley Ogilvie is a content writer at IT Glue, which develops documentation software for MSPs. Read all IT Glue blogs here.
