Completion Of Documentation Upgrade Project

All major milestones have been completed - Can we now just expect our internal staff to take over?

It has been our repeated experience over the years that no matter how well internal support staff are trained, if there is not some form of oversight on agreed to standards, those standards quickly fall apart. 

As an example, think about the number of passwords each week that your organization creates. How many months do you think it will take before there is a substantial number that no longer adhere to the implemented standards for naming them? 

We set up password names so that the global password list can be used in the most effective and granular way. At project completion as an example, every single AD Domain Admin password across every single client can be seen in a list just by typing "01 D" in the global password search column. 

Leaving Documentation Maintenance To Internal Staff?

Take a moment to consider how much time would be wasted if your new staff are trained to find the domain admin password this way and then in a short amount of time 5% of those names are now created using a random method of naming? 

It causes substantial back and forth between staff members who cannot find an important piece of information that can add up to hours all because it was 20 seconds faster to come up with a random naming convention. 

Documentation Maintenance Agreement The Solution?

With our system and again keeping it restricted to passwords for this example, we have 4 or 5 ways to methodically access passwords either from being located within the correct password folder, using a flexible asset for fast access to common passwords or the name itself.

By adhering to a strict password naming convention, your organization can now utilize the global tab in ITGlue (which 90% of organizations never use). 

Decent Into Documentation Anarchy

Staff tend to in almost all cases minimize the damage caused when they ignore naming standards and it costs your organization in wasted hours. I have personally seen well executed documentation remediation projects completely fall apart within 6 months if staff are not motivated to adhere to standards.

If you allow your documentation standards to be subject to the whims of your technical staff and do not put it as a high priority then no documentation remediation project in the world is going to help your organization.

3rd Party Documentation Maintenance

By continuing to engage us after the project completion has occurred, we use a number of methods to effectively monitor recorded entries into your documentation application. Depending on how your organization operates this can be considered as an ongoing cost or there may be a goal of internal staff taking over the maintenance completely.

Nobody wants to be the bad guy so the solution is to pay us to be the bad guy. We will both rectify and instill a culture within your organization that ensures the investment put into any documentation remediation project sees a return over the long term.

The cost to maintain a well structured documentation framework is so much cheaper than mopping up a slow rolling disaster.

Why Internal Staff Benefit From External Oversight

There is a possibility that when looking at any individual record with regards to documentation that staff could have a point, it could be argued that on any one particular record the way they have completed it is technically better.

The issue is that they get called away to do a project and do not look at the documentation system again for another 6 months or they leave for a position at another company and then the next person enters it their way & the same discussion on how their way is better than the old way is had before they half finish a document and the situation repeats itself over and over year after year until you do not have a standard and nobody is able to find anything.

It is better to have an average standard that is agreed to by everyone and then have everyone stick to it than to continually change things because the new lead tech believes there is a better way. It is important to reinforce that if it really is a better way then we need to take into account that every single document needs to be retroactively updated with this new standard otherwise there is no longer any standard.

How We Can Help

Our business has spent the last 10 years working only on improving the documentation framework that MSPs use within their documentation platform. We have seen what works, what does not work & have a refined documentation method of how we recommend setting the various components up. 

Sometimes a business comes along that does things so radically different that we either need to modify our method for them in some areas or if we feel they are too far outside our area of expertise then we will not take on the project. An example of this would be an MSP that only maintains the network infrastructure of clients. In a case like that, investing time on workstation or endpoint configurations is a waste of time where for most MSPs, it is a significant component to get right.

We are however able to help the majority of MSPs above 10 staff. Think of the bell curve or 80/20 rule, our best results are obtained for the MSP that provides a standard suite of documentation services to a MSP that has the standard number of clients for their given size.

Documentation Maintenance Agreement Requirements

We price the maintenance along similar lines to an MSP agreement. Once we have obtained signoff on the documentation remediation project then your organization has the option to engage us in maintaining any area where we have brought it up to an agreed upon standard.

The documentation maintenance agreement is offered to existing clients who have undertaken the full documentation remediation project and who have committed to undertaking all required steps.

This is not open to any systems that have not been brought up to the required standard. Think of it along similar lines to a managed services agreement and how you would handle a client site that has devices well outside the warranty period where your organization has not had the opportunity to bring it up to the minimum standard.

These prices are guides. We attempt to keep these amounts as fair as possible for your business. If your internal staff are able to carry most of the load without guidance and we are not logging as many hours as what is expected, then we will adjust this amount to reflect. If your company has factors that increase the expected labor expended then we will need to review the amount upwards.