Every Managed Service Provider struggles with the shortage of IT personnel. Many needs help managing their existing portfolios, let alone expanding their services or scaling up to more clients. Yet, that’s the way to survive. As you can read in the free whitepaper “Merger and acquisition wave in the MSP market“. Now, it’s ‘eat or be eaten’ in the industry.
Since the labour market’s squeeze is not temporary and traditional recruitment methods no longer work, MSPs must seek other long-term solutions. In our series on labour market shortages, we present several options. One of them is ensuring you can still grow with less experienced IT staff. This can only be achieved by restructuring your business model and processes and automating more: no more charging by the hour, but fixed monthly incomes from managing modern workplaces. In this blog, we’ll explain how you can escape the vicious circle caused by the labour market squeeze.
Working with less experienced IT staff and still growing
As an MSP, you’d prefer an experienced IT professional on your team. But for them, jobs are aplenty. They want to avoid handling standard tasks such as adding or removing users day in and day out. It’s easier to employ recent IT graduates. But their lack of experience can sometimes be risky. In practice, processes are often customer-specific. That means it works slightly differently per customer. If a request goes wrong or takes too long to execute, the client suffers quickly. Automating your work processes, such as the daily management of systems and users, is a good solution.
Surprisingly, many automation automates their work processes very little. Yet, this is the solution to combat the labour market squeeze!
Multi-tenant management, what are the benefits?
Automating your work processes requires that you first standardise them. In the daily management of the IT organisation, there are often client-specific procedures with little knowledge entrenched. New customers usually take over ‘as-is’ due to high work pressure and too little time. Much knowledge about the practices resides in the minds of experienced IT professionals. And that’s a business risk! When you automate, this changes. No specific process per client, but a fixed service package for managing modern workplaces. This might take some adjusting for your client, but better service is the trade-off, as it’s less prone to errors, faster, and safer.
Moreover, as a company, you’re no longer reliant on hourly billing and reactive management but get a fixed monthly income per workspace. There are plenty of benefits for you and the client, but it also offers advantages for your IT staff, which is what this blog is about. The Ydentic platform supports multi-tenant management. For IT staff, this means that clients have similar processes and standard tasks, thus taking less time.
Moreover, the platform makes hiring and training less experienced staff easier
The standardised environment provides clear procedures and guidelines, speeding up the learning process and shortening the induction period. As an MSP, you can successfully hire less experienced employees and still grow. Also attractive to more experienced IT professionals. This has benefits for your experienced IT professionals too. They get the opportunity to handle more challenging problems if they can spend less time on routine tasks. They can continue to grow within your company. This makes you a more attractive employer and reduces the likelihood of having to recruit new staff. By retaining your IT talents, you also have a competitive advantage over other players in the market.
Overall, employee satisfaction will increase as your employees spend less time on tedious tasks, can continue to develop, and work for satisfied customers. An example of employees spending more time on the fun side of work, thanks to the platform, is our client Ekco. Read their story here.
Benefits of Process Automation and Standardisation
In short, the benefits of a fixed service package through process automation and standardisation are:
- Saving on recruitment and salary costs
- More efficient execution of standard tasks
- Finally, the chance to take on new projects and scale up
- Increased job satisfaction
- Less prone to errors
The critical advantage regarding finding qualified IT personnel is that the Ydentic platform helps bridge the IT skill gap and gives IT professionals a chance to grow! Your IT staff can focus on more strategic and valuable tasks.
Break the vicious circle and grow!
The Ydentic management platform is a solution to free yourself from the vicious circle of not having the right IT staff to grow. It bridges the IT skills gap so that you can scale and grow even with less experienced IT professionals. Does this sound like something you want to work towards? Email or call us to discuss this further.
