In a previous blog post, we explained why healthy technology partners should be spending time learning about your business goals, allowing them to prepare for major needs many months in advance. Proactive technology support is important for a very obvious reason – it’s far cheaper to prevent technology failure than it is to clean up the mess afterwards. It has the added advantage of impacting worker productivity far less.
Is your Managed Service Provider (MSP) putting in the right amount of work to prevent problems before they happen, or are they only “patching and monitoring” your network? Here are three activities your technology partner should be performing regularly – and the benefits your company should be experiencing as a result.
Documentation – when you’re facing downtime, you don’t want the technician handling the issue to be the fifth person learning for the first time about how your network functions. This is what makes documentation critical. Beginning with the first days an MSP is managing your network, they should be documenting the infrastructure in a place that’s accessible by all the company’s technicians. Resolutions to any reported technical issues should also be documented. If a problem does recur, this documentation makes it much quicker to fix going forward.
Strategy Meetings – Your account manager should be meeting regularly with senior leadership at your company to discuss forward-looking business goals. While a ticket review or a new hardware discussion may be a part of this meeting, the primary goal should be to learn about what major upcoming company changes the account manager should expect. This way, your MSP is ready to provide technology insight the minute your company moves forward with new initiatives.
Project Management – If these strategy meetings are happening, your technology partner should be prepared to deliver a seamless transition when big events, such as an office relocation or a server migration, do occur. Proactive project management ensures that the MSP can allocate all of the resources needed to ensure this seamless transition. If the MSP doesn’t bother to learn about a project until the last minute, they probably won’t be able to give it the attention it deserves – while your transition will still happen, it’s not likely to be seamless.
To learn more about how WingSwept can bring proactive technology support to your company, call us at 919.779.0954 or contact us online.