In an effort to speed digital transformation, many MSPs and other companies are implementing technologies such as mobile, analytics, and cloud. As a result, countless complex IT environments that are appearing to address these needs including various delivery vendors, models, data, and processes. To make things more challenging, factors such as rising managing costs, rigid IT systems and quickly dwindling IT budgets are also happening at unprecedented rates. However, to be able to provide the digital transformations that companies need, there are managed service providers skills that MSPs must acquire and hone as best as they can.
Not only will managed service providers need to hone these skills but also they need to examine their strategies to ensure that their offered IT services are more efficient, effective, and valuable to their clients. Thus, creating possibilities for IT companies who are in search of outsourced managed services that enable them to focus their attention on the more important aspects of the business. This includes addressing strategic activities and functions to fix issues or problems within their company. As such, cloud solutions empower them to transform and take advantage of opportunities as soon as these prospects present themselves.
Remember that companies will most likely choose the right provider of managed services. One who will have the capacity to offer procedures, skills, and resources which surpass a company’s in-house capacities. So, here are the ten managed service providers skills that you need to possess to be able to convince companies to choose your MSP over in-house IT services.
1. Certified Skills And Experience
As part of the fundamentals, you as a managed service provider must possess certified skills that lend expertise past maintaining basic operating systems and/or availability management. Build up your skills to include managing virtualization, change, databases, high availability, and middleware. Other skill sets you can boost are cross-platform integration, multiple network technologies, security, mobility, and the most recent development – public and private cloud technologies.
In addition to these, you must also be able to incorporate scalability plus the availability of staff to offer help should your end-users need help using your solutions, products, or services. In line with this, you and your staff must have the proper skill sets needed to help your users or clients in any walkthroughs or troubleshooting requirements at any time they occur. You must discover how to best organize and share knowledge with your clients. Thus, you have to incorporate the best practices for using your services or solutions when talking to them.
You have to realize the importance of having deep expertise in every delivery model and vendor available to you to optimize sales and MSP growth. So, whether you are delving into the cloud and managed services or strategic outsourcing and traditional IT, you must know how to help optimize everything for your end-users or clients to afford them a unified multi-sourcing strategy between managed services, outsourcing, cloud, and in-house.
2. Hands-on, Technological Approach
Strive to be hands-on in providing problem prevention activities and consistent innovations to improve your solution and services. A proactive approach tends to offer more than simple monitoring as well as device management. To illustrate, employing advanced analytics will enable your users to prevent issues. By evaluating failure patterns throughout the processes and platforms, your clients can have more visibility and you can provide better services to them.
Be sure to spot technologies that you can include in your skills, services, or solutions to boost efficiency and effectiveness. Automated workload classification and arrangement, sophisticated alert devices, remediation, and automatic incident escalation are great examples of additions you can target.
3. Alignment Of ITIL Standards And IT Best Practices
Make sure to align the ITIL approach to your current IT service management. ITIL stands for IT Infrastructure Library and this lists best practices to ensure that you deliver well-organized IT support services to your clients. This tackles everything connected to the incident, problem, change, event, inventory, configuration, performance management, capacity, and reporting.
In line with ITIL standards, you must also be able to provide consistent and readily available IT Infrastructure to attain maximum IT management. So, new services and solutions you offer that used to require months to set up and run have to be delivered within just a few days now. These kinds of expectations and the unceasing demand for such service will surely put great pressure on IT operations and this will most likely affect you as the managed service provider.
To help minimize pressure, establishing IT best practices will ensure that solutions for predictable problems and issues are ready and in place for you and your users to execute as soon as these problems occur. In fact, active enhancement of your practices will empower you to handle even unexpected problems.
4. Constant Procedures, Knowledge Administration, And United Service Visibility
One of the managed service providers skills you must enhance is your reliable service delivery. This requires established procedures to be followed religiously to boost the repeatable course of action. You must also share your policy and procedures so that your clients will understand how these will be replicated throughout various locations and delivery centers. In addition, you have to be adept in knowledge administration so that you can provide the necessary tools or apps that will enable your clients or their employees to access historical problems or issues and the corresponding resolution for it.
Lastly, you have to provide a way for your clients to see the status of their infrastructure as well as your performance status as their managed service provider. In short, you have to design a secure website-based portal that provides all your client’s service needs and requirements. A dashboard that provides them with real-time information and secure access to online tools you’ve designed for their desired managing services with reporting capacities to boot will serve as the ultimate output for this service consolidation and access.
5. Support For Multicloud, Multivendor Environments Plus Solid Relationship
The current IT infrastructures are essentially hybrid environments of traditional IT and are comprised of software, hardware, network products, and private and public clouds from various IT vendors. To help you attain success, acquiring this managed service providers skill will allow you to enjoy the support of various IT vendors and multi-cloud hybrid settings. Finally, this will pave the way to building professional and business relationships with leading IT vendors that will ensure availability now plus visibility towards developing technologies and product development opportunities.
As a managed service provider, endeavor to have a vendor-neutral stand. Check out ways on how you can help your clients plan, manage, and operate throughout different cloud models with the ultimate goals of having the best fit for their business.
6. Reliable And Comprehensive Service Delivery, With Opportunities For Local Resources
Since technology is now readily available almost anywhere in the world, it is a good move to enhance your global capacities. This way, you can position yourself to provide managed services to small, medium, and large-scale companies that need your skills and solutions.
Here are the top four major benefits of being able to provide global delivery of services and solutions:
- The capability to properly manage client projects around the globe from your location
- The high probability of quick implementation in new and distant locations
- Localized language support for branches
- The chance to acquire local resources and information to address legal and regulatory requirements, especially for licensing and business establishment in a specific locale.
To optimize this skill, you have to employ reliable and comprehensive service deliveries to any of your branches as soon as possible. This includes effective communication and organization of all teams handling your branches worldwide.
7. SLAs Based On Performance
One of your most important managed service providers skills is your duty to provide Service-Level Agreements (SLAs) based on performance. So, make sure that you deliver the services you promised with less emphasis on how the service is done. This allows you to be more creative and innovative while improving the quality of your service delivery and cutting costs wherever possible.
In exchange for the leniency afforded to you on how the service is performed, you must also ensure that you meet all service levels needs with the understanding to settle any financial penalties or other conditions equivalent to any failed service delivery.
8. Extensive Portfolio of Managed Services Associated With Your Business Model
Another managed service providers skill you need to enhance is the flexibility to include managed services minus incurring unnecessary costs or adding complexity to your sourcing tactic.
As a managed service provider, aim to stack up on an extensive portfolio that will enhance your business model. When you have this, you can offer a complete set of managed services including managed security, infrastructure management, mobility, resilience, managed hosting and private cloud. Finally, being able to offer options like customization, equipment retention and processes retention if these prove to be beneficial for your clients.
9. Foresight In Technology And A Means Of Innovation
Strategic partnerships are on the rise to increase the chances of growth and success of MSPs and companies alike. However, you have to consider how these partnerships will impact on you and your partnership before you actually finalize that partnership. Think of the business outcome plus how it will change or affect the core business model and culture.
As an MSP, are innovation or transformation key parts of your client’s business strategy? If so, how can you contribute to its growth or success? To provide better services to your clients, you have to make sure that you can services that can make collaboration hassle-free and effectively, help your client develop a better business model, or empower them to expand into new markets.
10. Reputation Plus Financial Stability
Being a business yourself, you must realize that your clients would want to be able to trust you to handle their managed services and help them succeed sooner rather than later. Whether it is just for a short while or long-term, strategic partnerships must take the company’s reputation and financial stability into consideration.
To prove your worth, the years of existence of your company is not enough to ensure longevity. You have to show financial statements, annual reports, and references. You may also need to provide concrete proof of any claims by providing quantified metrics of your accomplishments and the contact details of your cited customer references.
Managed Service Providers Skills: The Bottom Line
All in all, managed service providers skills must be utilized to maximize the services that MSPs provide in their IT solutions and services. Though it may not be easily seen, companies using your services will eventually see the difference in the quality of services when you incorporate these skills in your offered services. In fact, more experienced companies should be able to discern how meticulous an MSP creates these offers.
Discover how your skills are aligned with the must-have managed service providers skills of the CWDash community. Be a CWDash managed services provider so you can avail of our free tools to help attain business success. For a free consultation, call now.
