Mastering Service Delivery: From Chaos to Zen with Actionable Strategies
Execution is the ability to mesh strategy with reality, align people with goals, and achieve the promised results.
- Lawrence Bossidy
Welcome back Autotask Warriors!
Ready for another exciting week of Autotask learning?
No? Too much outdoor stuff going on?
I disagree. As we dive into the summer months, it's the perfect time to focus on growing your MSP and unlocking new levels of efficiency. Get ahead now, while others waste time. 🌞
In this week's blog article, we delve into actionable strategies for transforming service delivery from chaos to a Zen-like work environment. You have now reached a pivotal point in optimizing your service delivery, where we focus on the crucial transitioning of your organization to achieve greater internal efficiency and enhance client-facing communication.
The pivot point includes 5 key discussions:
Chaos to Zen Transition Overview
Ready to Engage Monitoring Review
Triage Process Review
Tech Allocation & Scheduling Review
Pre-Position Scheduling
Chaos to Zen Transition Overview
The path from Chaos to Zen in a service environment involves reviewing key processes you've encountered during Service Coordinator training. This includes the intake process, the triage process, and open ticket management. By empowering your Service Coordinator to be the central hub of the organization, you lay the groundwork for this transformation.
However, before advancing further, it's essential to ensure that open ticket management is functioning correctly. Two primary indicators tell you if open ticket management is operating properly: first, conducting the black hole stuck ticket evaluation and ensuring everything is within tolerance; and second, and most importantly, checking the Ready to Engage Monitoring dashboard to ensure all Techs’ Ready to Engage widgets are in fine working order.
Until Techs trust the Ready to Engage widget, they won't use the dashboards, preventing them from the adoption of new engagement and disengagement processes critical for moving towards a Zen work environment.
Ready to Engage Monitoring Review
Ready to Engage Monitoring is arguably the most important element in intake and open ticket management. Service Coordinators often struggle with maintaining this dashboard, viewing it primarily as the Techs' Ready to Engage widget.
However, maintaining the Ready to Engage Monitoring dashboard is a core responsibility of the Service Coordinator and is critical because if the Ready to Engage widgets are not functioning correctly, Techs will not trust the dashboard. When Techs don't trust the dashboard, they revert to old habits, relying on messy lists like queue views, work lists, or "my tasks" which are not efficiently sorted by SLA automation and mix different types of tickets (scheduled, waiting, critical, standard).
Spending time manually sifting through lists trying to figure out the next task significantly reduces Tech efficiency; some Techs spend up to 10% of their time on this. Using the dashboard organizes their day, maximizes efficiency, shows them the next ticket to work on, and removes waiting tickets from their main view. Techs will only leverage the dashboards if they trust them, and that trust is built when the Ready to Engage widget is in fine working order.
It falls upon the Service Coordinator, as the hub of the company and controller of worklists and calendars, to the Ready to Engage Monitoring dashboard.
Maintaining the Ready to Engage Monitoring dashboard involves a few key steps:
View all widgets and ensure an SLA and next SLA event due date is present. Tickets without an SLA often result from being reopened or lacking a proper contract. Reopened tickets require manually clearing out the old resolve date/time in the ticket history to restore the SLA. Project or recurring tickets without an SLA should not be in this widget.
Look at due dates and remove old tickets. Tickets due today or in the future are fine, but those from yesterday or earlier should be removed. Techs tend to ignore overdue tickets, letting them drift. Overdue tickets need to be scheduled out, perhaps for the next Thursday afternoon, a good time for Techs to catch up. Scheduling them removes them from the widget and places them in the Tech's calendar.
Monitor ticket count per Tech. For Techs primarily doing remote desktop support, aim for 8 to 12 tickets in their widget. If there are too many or too few, use workload rebalancing.
Consistently maintaining this dashboard, even daily at first, is critical to the company's efficiency.
Triage Process Review
Reviewing the triage process and utilizing a triage decision tree is another key component for driving chaos out of the organization. The decision tree provides a repetitive, high-confidence method for triaging every ticket. It helps you focus on specific decisions based on the ticket path and can highlight opportunities for automation.
The triage process begins with cleaning up the ticket description to contain only the facts. Then, create a concise title summarizing the description. Verify the account is correct; incorrect accounts often go to a zero account if the domain isn't recognized, or the email is associated with multiple accounts. Finally, ensure every ticket has a contact, which is essential for client-facing communications.
The first major decision point is determining if the ticket is an incident (reactive, break/fix – something that was working but isn't now) or a service request (proactive, planned – something working as designed but needs changing, adding, moving, or installing).
Incidents follow urgency and impact workflows: Critical, High, High Backup, Medium, and Standard.
Service requests are governed by reasonable client expectations based on estimated hours. During triage, it's recommended to set the issue and sub-issue to "TBD" (To Be Determined) because the true issue is often only known upon ticket completion by the Tech.
Tech Allocation & Scheduling Review
Tech allocation, particularly leveraging the Advanced Operational Forecast Report, is vital for understanding staffing needs and planning future workloads. This report helps determine the required hours for different skill levels (Level 1, Level 2/NE2, Level 3) based on the types of work. For example, Level 1s typically handle medium, standard, quick hits, and small moves/adds/changes. Level 2s handle high priorities, high backups, and larger moves/adds/changes (> 4 hours), and installs. Level 3s typically manage project work and critical requests.
The report also distinguishes between work that fits into the Ready to Engage widget (like critical, high, medium, standard, quick hits, and small moves/adds/changes) and work that must be scheduled in a calendar (larger moves/adds/changes, installs, projects). The widget work is organized by SLA automation, while scheduled work requires specific time blocks. It is crucial to protect available hours for reactive widget work that comes in daily.
Pre-Position Scheduling
Pre-position scheduling is a better way to handle certain requests, particularly critical ones, compared to disruptive "all hands-on deck" approaches. Based on historical data from the Operational Forecast report, you can determine the expected daily hours needed for critical support. The Technique involves creating a recurring calendar block (e.g., 1.5 hours) assigned initially to yourself and then dropping it onto a scheduled Technician's calendar daily, often a Level 3 engineer. This designates a specific Tech to be available for critical requests that day.
When a critical request comes in, instead of interrupting everyone, you instant message (e.g., via Teams) the designated Tech. They acknowledge, start engaging with the client or investigating via RMM before the ticket is even fully created. When the ticket is created and a notification sent, everyone is informed who is handling the critical request and that they are already engaged, significantly reducing chaos and commotion.
This concept can be extended to scheduling blocks for ready-to-engage work, especially if visualizing availability is difficult. By proactively blocking out time for these workflow types on Techs' calendars, you ensure dedicated time for different tasks and help manage Tech workload and focus.
Maintaining a Tech allocation cheat sheet, reviewing it daily, and identifying your go-to people for different types of work (critical, break/fix widget work, larger MACs, installs) helps streamline the process of assigning new tickets quickly and efficiently.
Summary and Next Steps
Summer is often seen as a time to relax, but it's also an excellent opportunity to sharpen your skills, streamline your processes, and set the stage for future success. Remember, the work you put in now will pay off in the months and years to come. Let's make the most of this season by tackling challenges head-on and continuously improving our service delivery.
By diligently focusing on maintaining Ready to Engage Monitoring, mastering the triage process, understanding Tech allocation data, and implementing pre-position scheduling, you can significantly reduce chaos, improve Technician efficiency, and move your service delivery closer to a Zen-like state.
These steps ensure that your Service Coordinators are empowered to be the central hub of the organization, facilitating smoother workflows and better client interactions. The transition from chaos to Zen involves reviewing and optimizing key processes, maintaining critical dashboards, and strategically scheduling tasks to enhance overall productivity and service quality.
Now it’s time to get ahead while others waste time. Take your MSP operations to the next level. Dive deeper into our series on MSP Evolution and discover more strategies to streamline your processes and enhance service delivery. Check out our latest articles on monitoring chaos, workload rebalancing, and automation. Subscribe to our newsletter for exclusive insights and tips to keep your MSP ahead of the curve. Go watch some YouTube videos. Read “Unshackled.”
And finally, if you like Easy Buttons, email us at info@agmspcoaching.com and we can transform your MSP Operations together!