Like most MSPs, one of your biggest costs is people. Which means one of your biggest sources of waste is time. And as anyone in the IT world knows, there’s a lot of wasted time. IDC quantified this a couple of years ago, and found that IT workers spend around 20% of their time just looking for information. That’s because they need a lot of information, usually quite specific information, and for a lot of MSPs there’s no clear way that information is organized.

This wasted time affects you in more ways than you realize. Obviously your costs are higher, but it’s not just that. Onboarding new techs takes much longer – information is hard to find, and they take months to get up to speed learning where all the little bits of information are. On top of that, you’re not hitting your SLAs as much as you should, which means you can’t charge as much. And you’re less competitive so you don’t grow as fast. The documentation problem affects areas of your business you may not have thought of.

Too often, MSPs have information that is locked in the heads of their staff. Or documented in haphazard fashion in your PSA, Wikis, Sharepoint, Word docs or wherever. This is why your techs spend 20% of their time looking for information – it’s scattered around the company, sometimes documented and sometimes just in the head of one person.

Now imagine a world where all the information you needed to hit your SLAs was documented in one place. No more shoulder-tapping. No more guessing. And that 20% of time spent looking for information is closer to 5%.

In this world, you hit your SLAs almost every single time. In this world, new staff are closing tickets in a week, not a month. In this world, your junior techs are almost as good as your best tier 3. You’re making more and saving more. Your staff are less frustrated and your clients love you.

New techs onboard much more quickly. All your techs are more efficient. Your clients are over the moon, and you’re much better positioned to both charge a premium for your premium service, or deliver such exceptional value that you grow rapidly. The best MSPs do both.

This world of exceptional documentation exists, and when you get there, you’ll realize just how central, how critical, organized documentation actually is in the IT world.