5 steps to becoming a Managed Service Provider
Defining Managed Services and SLAs
As an IT service Provider who needs to define Managed Services and Service Level Agreements (SLAs), are you asking yourself:
- How can I create my service catalogue?
- How can I define my SLAs?
- How can I make sure that what I´m offering is attractive?
5 steps to becoming an MSP: Defining Managed Services and SLAs
1. Creating the basis for Managed Services – ITIL
Before you develop and offer your Managed Services, we recommend getting familiar with process management. After all, that’s what building a Managed Services business is all about: understanding, managing and streamlining processes. To help you familiarise yourself, get to know the concept of ITIL, which describes the processes and best practices for operating IT systematically and successfully.
Processes that are particularly important for the development of Managed Services are:
- Incident management – to record customer problems, enter them as tickets and start working on solutions
- Change Management and the management of IT infrastructure – to carry out all adjustments and changes in a controlled and efficient manner
- Service Catalogue – which defines the services and prices of your offerings in a way that is transparent and unambiguous for your customers.
The ITIL training academy has some great resources around this topic – find out more here
2. Defining your services and service catalogue
It’s important that you only offer what you really know how to do. The more standardised your services and solutions are, the more efficiently your employees can implement and use them. Automation is the key to scaling services.
3. One-off benefits
Nevertheless, you will almost certainly have one-off activities that need to be defined and recorded in your service catalogue. Typical examples include system installations, the provisioning of servers, workstations, networks, printers, applications, and so on.
Our big tip – standardisation is key here, to help you increase efficiency.
If you want to scale your business through standardisation, have a look at our Managed RMM solution
4. The Service Level Agreement (SLA)
Once you’ve defined your service catalogue and which tools you want to use, you can define your Service Level Agreements (or SLAs for short). These should include:
- Service Desk metrics
- Which services must be provided (or not)
- Who provides which service, where and when
- Which reports you present to the customer, with which key figures, to document your performance and prove your worth.
5. Service Level Management
Service Level Management is important, as it enables you to continuously monitor and evaluate the IT service levels you’ve defined in your SLAs.
The three most important metrics you should measure are:
- Response Time – which measures the amount of time it takes you to respond to an incident
- Solution Plan – how long it takes you to come up with a plan to resolve the problem
- Resolution Time – which measures how much time has passed between the alert, the design of a Solution Plan and the resolution of the problem.
You can find more tips and tricks on Managed Services on our YouTube channel or get in touch with us
Where does SYNAXON Services come in?
Read more about other SYNAXON Managed Services
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