After decades of traditional tiered managed service models, something new is here.
You know that a managed service provider remotely (or on-site) manages your IT infrastructure and systems, taking away the headache so you can get on with running your business. From its emergence in the late 1980s managed services has evolved alongside technology developments that created the requirement for greater support, resulting in a MSP market expected to reach USD 354.8 billion by 2026.
But did you also know there is now a more intelligent model for managed service delivery, one that results in a stronger support safety net and delivers greater benefits to your business?
Let me explain.
Managed Service Provider – v1.0
Traditionally, MSPs used a tiered support model following a structured approach, generally seen as IT industry best practice:
Level 0 – self-service
Level 1 – triage/call handling/ticket raising
Level 2 – technical remediation
Level 3 – system, service, vendor and/or product support
The positives
Customers understand where they are in the process and have a single ‘pane of glass’, and usually a single point of contact. Level 1 can be undertaken by a large number of resources, that is to say anyone able to capture information and triage the problem.
The downsides
However there are also some negatives, particularly at the Enterprise level.
Customers can be ‘stuck’ or ‘jump’ between different levels, resulting in frustration, particularly if it is an issue which could have been resolved much quicker, for example if it had gone direct to a level 3 support resource.
For particularly problematic systems, products and software issues queues can form while waiting for a fix, especially if that queue is dependent on a single resource or lengthy SLA.
Crucially, the silo approach means each level becomes self-reliant, inhibiting knowledge transfer and sharing.
Managed Service Provider - v2.0
As part of our passion for constantly looking for ways to do things better, we knew the tier model could be vastly improved. It had become clear that staff training and development, exposure to new technology, and service excellence and resilience across the industry was being held back by colleagues being siloed into unhelpful tiers.
We decided that change was due. Step forward, the ‘swarming’ model.
If you’re one of the people now Googling ‘swarming meaning’ I can tell you that swarming’s origins rest in Cisco’s ‘Model for distributed collaboration and decision making Digital Swarming white paper, which once you get over that tongue twister and enjoy the four pages of pure operational bliss, essentially refers to a process of helping staff improve collective awareness and collaboration in the digital era.
In my role as Operations Director at HTG I have begun the introduction of a variation of the swarm model, breaking down our Managed Services team into distinct teams (swarms), which are rotated every week, ensuring that all agents are exposed to all customers, where allowed. The swarms are split into categories:
Triage Swarm – responsible for triaging all calls into the Service Desk, with a 15-minute timeline to resolve.
Backlog Swam – meet every 90 minutes to pick up all tickets which take more than 15 minutes to resolve – are responsible for ensuring the ticket is resolved.
Severity 1 Swarm – for any ticket deemed as an outage or severity 1 incident – this goes straight to senior engineers.
Monitor Swarm – in conjunction with monitoring tools, proactively monitors internal and external environments with a distinct checklist, raising tickets for issues found.
Much like their insect namesakes, swarms form quickly, attacking a problem and then quickly dissipating, creating an intelligent environment that ensures service resilience and continuous improvement over time.
As agents rotate, their knowledge of your infrastructure and users grows, and they will proactively seek any issues, remediations or suggestions. Compare that to the traditional tiered model, where a certain engineer would need to be made available due to a lack of upskilling or knowledge throughout the team – giving you a dangerous single point of failure for your business-critical service.
At HTG, we are on a mission bordering on the obsessive, which is to be the very best Managed IT Service provider. We are constantly seeking out new and intuitive ways to improve the service, and sometimes that means pushing the boundaries and challenging the status quo. Hence the implementation of our new swarming support model.
The traditional MSP is dead, long live MSP v2.0.
If you want to know more, get in touch.
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