We spoke to Ian Richardson, Co-Founder and Principal Consultant at Fox & Crow Group, about why you should apply the same project management process you use for customers to your MSP’s internal projects
Ian Richardson sold his MSP, Doberman Tech, in 2021 and began helping other MSP owners scale their companies with an eye to selling them. To this end, he has worked with businesses as small as $2 million in revenues and as large as $100 million. “No matter the company size, though,” he says, “there is one mistake nearly everyone makes: They fail to apply the same rigor to their own internal initiatives that they use to manage customer projects.”
This always has an unfortunate outcome. Without a system, these initiatives either land permanently on the back burner or soak up revenues.
Why your internal projects are chaotic
Internal initiatives typically start when someone – often the owner – discovers a new tool or software, perhaps at a trade show or via a sales call, that will solve an internal need. “He or she seagulls in – swoops in from above – drops the newly acquired tool and announces to the team that implementing it is now a high priority,” says Richardson.
Internal initiatives are a good idea. It’s what happens next, though, that is problematic.
If there is no system in place for handling internal projects – and it is the rare MSP that has this – the next phase in this process creates serious, revenue-sapping chaos.
“With no plan for executing an internal initiative like this, the rollout will be haphazard,” he says. Without steps, tasks, dependencies, and a schedule, there will be mistakes, misfires, duplications, and do-overs on the implementation.
And without a system for prioritizing work, protecting billable hours, and scheduling the time of essential resources, skilled team members will be pulled away from customer-facing work to address this initiative. That will impact revenue since you can’t bill for internal projects. It will damage customer relationships since their projects will take a hit. And it is unsustainable because before the project is complete, resources will be yanked back to client needs and emergencies.
If you don’t approach internal projects with a smart system in place for managing them, they will start out strong, turn to fits and starts, and end up eternally on the back burner.
How to manage internal projects without chaos
There is an easy way to avoid this mistake. Here’s what Richardson tells MSPs to do instead.
1. Protect important work from urgent problems
There is an upside to the failed internal initiative. It highlights a mistake that is likely affecting more than this project. Your company has no system for managing urgency.
The first step to getting internal initiatives on track is to solve this by creating escalation procedures.
“Clients will always call with emergencies,” he says. “That is the nature of this work. When something fails that is critical to the function of their business, they will call you and expect you to handle it immediately. You are their MSP. When that happens, your people will do what they should do: Put down the important work and focus on the emergency.”
If you want to carve out time for your internal initiatives – and other non-urgent but important work – you need escalation procedures that ensure that only real emergencies cause this response.
Let’s say you have two or three people tasked with handling high-level work such as a client’s server failure. That team’s time is essential to your business. If they aren’t focused on real emergencies and billable work, your customers’ needs will not be met, and your revenues will suffer. Let’s assume you built your budget and schedule around this team spending six hours of every eight focused on billable work.
In many MSPs, though, there are no guardrails in place to protect that time. “If the phone rings with what looks like an emergency to the person handling tickets or someone has a question about a project, they interrupt those engineers,” explains Richardson. “Very quickly, those six billable hours are down to five, then four, or two. Meanwhile your backlog on professional services grows.”
Escalation procedures are designed to protect that billable time.
When a ticket comes in, the help desk person needs clear triage procedures. “They need a specific process for escalation,” he says. “Perhaps you instruct them to send all tickets they can’t resolve in 20 minutes to a remote tier-two team. A system like that will protect your high-level engineers from 80 to 90 percent of those interruptions.”
2. Rank your initiatives
Next, develop a procedure for prioritizing internal projects.
It’s important that someone in a high-level management position – or the owner – develops, or at least endorses, this system.
“It is the rare employee who can push back against the boss with a shiny new toy he wants to implement instantly,” says Richardson. “Without a clearly defined process, one that the boss approved, most people will make that new toy a priority.”
If you have a system for handling internal projects, though, your team will know what to do when you find something exciting. “There should be a virtual drawer where they put these shiny, new ideas. When you come back from a trade show excited about a new tool, your team knows to put this new toy in that drawer with all the other internal initiatives,” he says.
Then it should be someone’s job to rank those initiatives in terms of their importance to your company’s growth, goals, and profitability.
The job of ranking those initiatives typically falls to the leadership team. “That team should get together on a regular cadence – every 90 days or so – to open that drawer and choose one or two of those initiatives to put on the schedule,” says Richardson.
How much time should you spend on internal initiatives? That depends on the health of your business systems. If your company is running well, for the most part, spending 10 percent of the senior leadership team’s time on business improvement is a good goal.
3. Put those projects on a plan
Now that you have a system in place for protecting your billable hours and a process for handling new business initiatives, put your internal projects – the one or two the leadership team has decided to implement – on a project plan.
Get all the tasks down. Detail every step in the process. Take account of the dependencies.
Calculate how much time each task will take. What duration will you allow for each phase? Assign each piece of that project to the appropriate resources so that the work is on people’s calendars.
When the management team greenlights a couple of projects and you handle them in the same way you would handle a project for a client, your internal systems will slowly improve.
You won’t cause the company to flounder in the face of new ideas. Nor will those ideas be forgotten. If you follow these three steps, those ideas will see fruition. They might not be implemented immediately or even quickly. But they will get done.
Best of all, you can get excited about new technologies such as AI and automation without throwing your business into a tailspin. “You run an MSP, after all,” says Richardson. “You live and breathe technology. You want to have all the new toys. This way, you will have a place to keep them and time to use them.”
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Ian Richardson is nationally recognized as a leader in managed services, the Co-Founder and Principal Consultant at Fox & Crow Group. After 16 years as the founder & CEO of Doberman Tech, he sold his MSP at the end of 2021 and began helping MSP owners scale and sell their companies. He enjoys time with his wife and business partner Carrie, their three children, and dog. Look for them out around the country in #pennythevan.
For more advice about managing projects in your MSP, check out Moovila’s project management blog.
