Documentation Remediation Projects For Managed Service Providers

Investing in a documentation overhall for your MSP is a excercise that requires a certain scale of business before clear benefits are realized.

Our experience has proven that investing in a documentation overhaul for your MSP is an exercise that requires a certain scale of business before there are clear benefits with going ahead with the project.

While there are certainly exceptions depending on how your MSP is built, we have found that companies of less than 5 technical staff are still growing their own processes and procedures.

They are often run by the owner who has a strong view on how things should be set up. In other words, sometimes business owners need to take a few years seeing what does not work to see the value in what we provide. 

Economies of scale make a big difference with a documentation project. Once a business is north of 5 technical staff, they often have a clear path, have been struggling with a documentation system that has had relatively little planning put into it and are at a point they know there are issues and understand changes need to be made.

Companies above 5 technical support staff are easier to work with, have a clear understanding of what they are trying to achieve & understand that a company like ours has seen the same issues over and over again & are likely best positioned to give guidance with the highest likelihood of success.

Improvements Your MSP Can Expect

We will use the example of implementing a universal onboarding and offboarding framework for all of your clients, this is a common task that often results in significant efficiency improvements.

Above 5 technical staff, every small improvement clocks up impressive time savings because of the critical mass of staff that are exposed to the improvements.

We are not magicians, we are more like janitors that will come in and do the work that your own staff are too busy to do & likely do not get much satisfaction from. 

Put in the simplest terms, we implement consistency in your organization in such a way that by completion, you can hire less experienced staff to undertake positions previously that were held by more experienced staff.

Poor documentation is overcome by hiring staff that have done whatever task is in front of them, that many times that they do not really need to rely on documentation. They will get there in the end.

The problem then gets compounded because it is normally these support staff that are asked to create a document on a procedure. 

They have too little time and have a different idea of what constitutes good documentation when compared to all other technicians. 

It is a certainty that if you have 15 technicians then you will have 45 opinions on how documentation should be undertaken depending on the time of day and numerous other variables.

This results in MSP documentation that is often not even of use to the person that wrote it. Most companies do invest time in documentation however the consistency and quality is of such a poor standard that nobody trusts it. 

People will not use documentation they do not trust and so the new guy that just started who is committed to not look dumb in front of his new workmates will attempt to use the documentation for a specific task which is often confusing and written by someone with much more experience that has left out numerous important steps. 

They will spend hours of their time trying to solve the problems before giving up and contacting one of the senior techs to ask a question. 

This wastes 2 peoples time & often causes frustration with senior techs as they are often under quite a bit of pressure & have to drop everything to try and help the new guy out.

It causes stress in new hires, frustration in experienced staff & is something that can be eliminated by seeking our help to standardize your documentation and make it a time saving resource instead of a hindrance.

How We Solve Your Documentation Problems

We implement consistency, standardization backed up with staff training driven off the back of your Documentation platform such as IT Glue or Hudu.

We make sure all documents, passwords, flexible assets and configurations adhere to a naming convention so it is identical across all clients. 

We separate client specific information from general instruction guides so that a new guide does not need to be written for every single client. We break up common segments of a how to guide into blocks that can be bolted into any new or existing clients document.

We train existing and new staff through one on one training, knowledgebase documents and video training how to create useful documentation that adheres to the agreed upon standard. 

We implement a workflow rule that allows us to check any new or updated documents and ensure they meet the minimum standard. If there are issues we will follow up with help desk staff after having remedied the oversights. 

Best practice is to have them rectify the issues however sometimes the best way forward is to obtain the missing information & we update the document.

Using the onboarding as an example here, say 5 of your clients use Skype or a 3rd party signature application. We write a template once that applies to any existing client or new client that needs to have one of these common applications setup. We copy the block into the clients onboarding documentation.

This prevents the infinite loop of continually writing the same documentation 50 different ways each time a new client comes on. 

We also structure the documentation so that the folder structure is identical across all clients. Every client will have an Active directory user setup section within their onboarding documentation. 

The clients that do not use Active directory authentication will just have an index entry that is not hyperlinked to the steps for this process. 

This is important because it does several important things, new staff will have a clear and consistent experience across all clients, the menu system will be identical and so they will become comfortable with it.

By having the menu item there keeping it consistent while also having it unlinked, it tells the new staff member that someone has considered this process and it is not required.

When you are new to an organization, it is very easy to become unsure of the information in front of you. Having the ability to quickly know that this section is not relevant for this client is much more effective than not having the section listed at all. 

This is because it introduces uncertainty, did someone just forget to write a guide for it? Were they too busy? Should I ask someone? We often have landing pages in IT-Glue that tell staff if they click on a flexible asset that "This subsystem eg: VOIP is not part of the managed service agreement - do not start work on any VOIP tickets for this client" 

Telling staff what your MSP does not do is just as important as how to do the tasks that are part of an agreement. Many hours to this day are lost by organizations spending hours on help desk service tickets and services the client does not actually pay for.

Requirements For A Remediation Project

Below we list the steps we need put in place so that we can be best positioned to help you through a successful documentation remediation project.

Documentation Remediation Pricing Guidelines

We like to give a guide on approximately what the initial cost is. Remembering that often the existing systems have been in place for sometimes decades and there are thousands of documents and passwords to work through. 

This figure would be a guideline on the initial investment & depends on how much you want to rectify. Most companies will engage us using a block time arrangement as this gives everyone time to become comfortable working with us and to develop a level of trust. 

We will always give a list of tasks that we can complete with the agreed to number of hours so if you decide at the end to continue in house or take a different path, the investment will not have been wasted.

Each estimate builds on the one to the left so the 300 hour block would include tasks listed on the 100 hour block yet because of the economies of scale and the efficiency scale brings, more tasks can be undertaken for a given dollar value. 

Coupled with a slight discount for the purchase of higher block amounts & the value increases as the number of staff increases.