How to Ignite Productivity With Your MSP Software Solutions

Each day, your managed services provider (MSP) team members move between your professional services automation (PSA) tool, your documentation software and your remote monitoring and management (RMM) solution.

These are the key pieces of the MSP toolkit. And you buy into these pricey tech solutions—and others—because they promise to improve efficiency, boost productivity and increase revenue for your business. They promise to help you better service your clients. So of course, there’s an expectation that the members of your team are making good use of them.

But when was the last time you had a good, honest look at your team’s digital workday?

You might have some educated ideas or gut feelings about how time’s being spent and how the various pieces of your MSP software toolkit are being used. But do you have the data to back that up?

And if you make some process and tech usage changes along the way to add efficiency or improve work output, how do you really know if your changes were effective?

• Setting benchmarks
• Making data-backed adjustments
• Tracking and measuring the outcomes of your adjustments

All of these actions make all the difference between running your business based on those gut feelings and running it based on hard facts. And you can leverage the data and knowledge gained to provide guidance and coaching support to lift up your entire team.

By making productivity gains and having smarter, more scalable work processes, your MSP team not only saves time but will also enjoy more focused workdays—a shift that can really help propel your business into the future.

And of course, it all starts with those most-used tools.

What does effective MSP software usage look like?

First off, let’s get real about how much time actually gets spent doing real work in an 8-hour workday.

While studies over the years have shown the number could be fewer than three hours per person (yikes!), let’s be generous and say your team members are working between five and six hours a day.

Regardless of the size and maturity of your MSP business, your team members are probably spending the majority of their time—maybe even half of their working time—in your PSA tool.

Another 20 to 30% of your team’s collective time likely goes to your MSP documentation software. If it doesn't? Then your team probably should spend more time in there than they currently do.

And, of course, the amount of time spent in your RMM software really depends on the role of the team member.

So let’s break it down even further.

I recently spoke with Todd Kane, President of Evolved Management Consulting —a firm that helps IT service companies operate more successfully. Kane is also an advisor to Produce8.

Here's what he had to say about how the various roles within an MSP team tend to use their key tools throughout the average workday.

• Tier 1: Your team members in this role will spend a lot of their time working in your PSA, then into your documentation software, then back to your PSA tool again. Alternating between these tools is pretty standard work behavior for Tier 1s. And your Tier 1 team members are likely closing between 10 and 20 tickets per workday.
• Tier 2: These team members probably spend more of their time working in your RMM software and slightly less in your PSA tool. A typical workflow for them might look like this: They pick up a ticket, check your RMM, check your documentation software, work on the ticket and then update the documentation. These team members are likely closing between 5 and 10 tickets per day.
• Tier 3: The total time spent in your MSP software will be less for your Tier 3 team members, as good Tier 3s spend more time in other tools doing project work. However, the workflow of a Tier 3 will vary dramatically based on the maturity of the business. These team members are more likely to be spending time in your RMM and also your documentation platform—if you have a strong documentation culture in your organization. Tier 3s from low-maturity MSPs will likely spend less time in documentation though. These team members are closing up to 5 tickets per day.

The above are all broad MSP software-usage generalizations, of course. And we haven’t even touched on the more than an hour a day each member of your team likely spends in collaboration and communication tools in between. Which is why benchmarking your own team’s daily habits, patterns and workflows is vitally important and can lead to some really interesting and productive conversations and business changes.

It’s time to start reviewing the facts.

Assess how your team’s really using your MSP software

The reality is, if you don’t have your MSP team’s workflow and escalation management set up properly, you’re struggling with productivity and you’re not servicing your clients as well as you could be.

If your team’s sending too many DMs to navigate the workday or are inefficiently flip-flopping and context switching all over your tech stack, it’s hurting your collective outcomes.

The truth about context switching and digital distraction

Unnecessary context switching and distractions from communications tools degrade your team’s ability to do more work—or at least more concentrated work. People are convinced they’re good at multitasking, but they’re not. Time is always lost in the process.

It’s called the ‘task-switching tax’ and it steals about 15 to 23 minutes of time, every switch, every time.

We created Produce8 to help teams like yours see what’s happening during the digital workday. It’s a work analytics platform that enables you to measure and analyze your team’s interactions with their technology.

Note that the platform only records time spent in the apps that have been subscribed to by the team, as opposed to everywhere team members spend their time in a digital workday. Why? Because this tool isn’t about tracking and micromanaging. It’s about sharing and collaborating around the tools where your team gets work done to create collective efficiencies and success.
And starting with your most used tools makes so much sense.

You can use Produce8 to:

• Establish data-backed software usage benchmarks.
• Evolve your team’s work habits and patterns toward more effective systems and processes.
• Maximize the value of your tech stack and the time your team spends on concentrated work.

So what will be the outcome of your team’s MSP software usage assessment?

The results of your MSP’s software usage assessment

The results you uncover from a technology usage assessment really depend on your business.

You may find team members are using your software solutions exactly how you’d expect. Great! But you might also find a huge discrepancy between how high performers and lower performers are using your tools. This creates opportunities to start implementing some performance management standardization.

• What does the workday of your star team member look like?
• How do they accomplish more in 8 hours than anyone else?
• And how can you start to cross-train with your entire team?

Discrepancy between performance levels could also call for some changes in how your business onboards new team members.

Some questions you can start to tackle around onboarding and ramp up include these:

• How effective is my onboarding process and the quality of my documentation?
• How long should I assume it'll take team members to become efficient and reach that high-performer level?
• How can I be sure a new hire has been properly onboarded?

Your assessment might also reveal a huge problem with context switching, which we touched on earlier. A lot of time might be slipping away between too many software switches, or perhaps even too many messages and meetings.

People are spending nearly an hour of each average work day simply looking for the information they need to do their jobs within their various tools and applications, according to a 2021 study by Qatalog in collaboration with Cornell University’s Ellis Idea Lab. People are also interrupting at least two team members up to five times a day to get what they need, even though they have central places where information is supposed to be available.

Some questions you can start to tackle around digital distraction and non-productive time include these:

• How much billable time is being spent per support staff (3 hours, 5 hours, etc.)? What's a good goal?
• What's taking away the time for your team?
• And is that time being well spent and is it justifiable to clients?

Regardless of what you find in your own team’s data, it’s far better to really understand your team’s interactions with your MSP software—and even your entire tech stack —than to continue on with nothing more than assumptions.

You need the data so you can start taking action.

Get the data. Get more value from your MSP software. Get productive.

You can’t make business decisions without accurate, real-time data anymore. That’s poor management practice, and the future’s in the facts.

If you give your MSP team the tech tools to service your clients, you also need to establish what good utilization of those tools looks like. And you need to keep monitoring and measuring your team’s processes and workflows over time so you can adjust and pivot as needed.

The work world has never been more digital-first nor more remote-first than it is right now. And succeeding in this space and time means embracing constant change and adapting toward a better future of work for your clients, your team and your MSP business as a whole.