Your MSP relies on RMM. Here’s why it needs APMM.
It’s been a good year for your MSP. You’ve leaned into using automation and popular tools, like ConnectWise RMM, to deliver excellent, fast, 24/7 services to clients. And they have responded by signing up for more services and recommending you to friends and colleagues. Your sales team is thrilled because they are closing so much new business, but yet, you have a bad feeling.
This new work will require more staff. It will also initiate a quantum leap in the complexity of the services and projects you manage. You already spend late nights scouring calendars, charts, and spreadsheets to keep the work you have on schedule. How much more time can you spend?
The solution is not to spend more time on project management.
The key is to apply the sort of automation and remote monitoring you use to govern your client’s networks and endpoints to project management. If you lean into Autonomous Project Monitoring and Management (APMM), staying on top of the details of work gets easier, even as the work becomes more complex.
How APMM works
APMM uses mathematical models, remote monitoring, and artificial intelligence to lift the monotony of tracking, communicating, and timeline vigilance off your plate. You don’t have to calculate delivery dates, gather data, communicate details, and oversee project progress. An AI can do all that faster and better, leaving you to focus on high-level decisions and the work you do best.
Let’s say, for example, you just added several new customers to your portfolio.
When you onboard each of them, APMM quickly predicts a delivery date– using templates you created and the real-time availability of your team. You are confident of this date because – even though APMM did all the calculations, compared calendars, estimated task durations, and built a critical path to delivery – it did so using your data.
As the work unfolds, though, changes inevitably happen.
APMM helps you manage change in real time
Let’s say you scheduled Kevin – your newly hired data architect – to optimize the infrastructure for three new clients. You are thrilled about this new work because Kevin was an expensive hire. You were hoping to raise your offerings to meet his skills. And Kevin is booked solid for months, a terrific validation of that expense.
When he starts on the first project, though, the client decides to expand the scope. This is more confirmation of Kevin’s skills. But when you plug in the schedule change, RPAX (Moovila's intelligent APMM engine) changes the project scores for a half dozen clients.
You bring up the project with the lowest score and APMM tells you that the delivery date – and several must-meet deadlines are now at risk. The same is true – to varying degrees – for several other projects.
You knew this extra work would set some projects back a few days but could not have predicted that such a small change would jeopardize the promises you made to so many clients. But APMM can see everyone’s calendars – including people’s commitments to other projects, vacation time, holidays, and anything else that impacts the schedule – and quickly calculate the impact on every project. It can see all the problems – well into the future – in seconds.
APMM identifies and remediates problems before they happen
You alert Kevin to the extent of the problem caused by extending the timeline for this project and he suggests a freelancer he thinks could handle one of the simpler optimizations. After a few phone calls and an hour of tweaking, you have added this freelancer to your roster, slotted him in to cover Kevin’s schedule in three weeks, moved a few negotiable deadlines and team member commitments around – all guided by the intelligence of the APMM.
Your projects are all back to green, and you relax.
If you were relying on calendars, emails, spreadsheets, or a manual work management tool, solving for this delay would have taken days – after you realized how big the problem was. But you might never have noticed the impact of some of these delays until keystone tasks were missed and important deadlines were imminent. Then you would have been forced to hire quickly or, failing at that, ask Kevin to work long hours.
Ultimately, the extra work you got from that first client might have cost you the goodwill of many other customers and caused you to burn out and lose a terrific hire – and all the business he would have brought in.
With APMM, you were able to see every downstream problem this one scheduling change caused and mitigate each of them quickly before there was any impact to your business.
The parts of APMM
APMM improves your efficiency and reduces the workload of tracking projects in four ways:
Diagnostics
APMM runs constant diagnostics across your entire portfolio of work. It monitors every change and the impact of that change on every schedule, task, deadline, and delivery date to give each project an indicator of when troubles might arise. Within Moovila Perfect Project, for example, the indicator is a real-time color code and project score, so you know when there is trouble immediately.
Remediation and Recasting
When a delay happens, APMM walks you through remediation and recasting so everything is done in the right order, and nothing is overlooked. It shows you how every change affects interdependent projects and resources, keeps important dates anchored, and flags anything that shortens timelines or requires additional resources.
Monitoring and Communication
APMM keeps track of when tasks are completed – and when they aren’t finished on time. And it automatically calculates how each event affects every detail of the project. If an overdue task causes a problem, the indicators should highlight the potential problems immediately. In Moovila’s case, the RPAX score drops so you can see what’s wrong and fix it.
APMM also communicates what it knows about completed and late tasks to everyone adjacent to them. This frees your people to work rather than spend time updating team members on project statuses.
Integrations
Siloed data is the curse of a dexterous organization. APMM connects all the relevant project data – in spreadsheets, calendars, ticketing services, or CRMs – so that your planning tool is pulling from current information and no one has to do duplicate data entry in each tool.
APMM helps you grow without pain
Just as RMM helped you grow your offerings in ways that throwing more people at the work could not, APMM helps you keep track of that work as it gets more complex. Automating your work management – and adding 24/7 monitoring – lets you grow your MSP without suffering growth pains or asking your clients to suffer them with you.
Revolutionize project management at your MSP with APMM
Download this white paper to dive in deeper into how Autonomous Project Monitoring & Management can help your MSP.
Get started with APMM
If you are ready to leverage APMM to lighten the load of managing a complex project portfolio, take our state-of-the-art APMM solution, Perfect Project, for a spin.
Perfect Project is Moovila’s solution for Managed Service Providers that helps MSPs and MSSPs streamline operations, automate schedule management, and optimize resource allocation to deliver superior project outcomes—and is integrated into the PSA you are already using. We do this through RPAX, Moovila’s advanced APMM engine, that allows MSPs to identify project delays, eliminate bottlenecks, and optimize resource allocation, all while improving margins and increasing overall customer satisfaction. Learn more about how you can transform your MSP's services delivery with APMM today by watching our APMM webinar on-demand.
