Nobody who loves their job wants to be average at it. You want to excel, but it can be difficult to elevate yourself when day-to-day tasks stop you from learning more or getting to bigger and more valuable projects.
So what can you do about it?
One solution is to ally with a managed services provider, so we’ve outlined three ways that engaging with an MSP can mitigate your day-to-day challenges and and leave your in-house IT focused on building value.
Time Savings
While working to finish proactive projects, like a new server backup system, your team is sidelined by unexpected time-consuming tasks like password resets, software updates, and patches. MSPs are equipped to quickly run with these types of jobs, and forging a partnership can help keep your team focused on value-driving efforts.
We’re currently working with a large non-profit organization and have offloaded over 450 helpdesk tickets per week, including password resets, phone support issues, web-based training support, and more. Those tickets amount to about 12 hours of saved time for their internal IT team team. What could opening up 12 hours of bandwidth mean for your team?
Cost Savings
Almost half of all IT and business professionals polled by the Computing Technology Industry Association reported that working with MSPs reduced their annual IT spending by 25% or more—and 13% of those respondents reported more than half of their budget being reduced! Those savings could be put towards any number of things, like new toolsets, better hardware, or better security.
It tends to be the menial tasks that grow alongside the organization—as your company grows, so will your need for low-skilled IT team members. These team members won’t drive a ton of value toward your bottom line, but instead just keep things working. Not the most strategic use of resources, whereas a strong managed services partnership can be scaled as your company grows.
Drive Value
As MSPs increase your bandwidth for new projects, you’ll be able hire specialized team members, instead of jack-of all-trades types. Specialized team members add to your competitive advantage as they will spend their time on proactive projects, empowering other departments with technology to improve productivity and collaboration. Technology is a necessity in today’s economic environment, you should have the team necessary to focus on winning in your industry.
Advantages won’t just come from the inside though—depending on your partnership, managed service providers can also offer strategic advice on productivity, collaboration, and more—getting your internal team to think outside the box, and offering tactics learned from working with other organizations and industries.
When you’re looking to reach new goals with your IT team, these benefits should give you an idea of how to get past the break/fix model of IT support and move into driving value and becoming more competitive.
Has your organization worked with an MSP in the past? We’d love to hear how it affected your IT workflow!