In my last blog, I covered a very common but challenging IT question businesses face today: namely, what you should consider when outsourcing your IT to a third-party provider, such as a managed service provider (MSP). As a follow-up, I wanted to discuss how you can best assess the ROI of these relationships if you do decide to pull the trigger. Let’s explore how you can effectively gauge your MSP’s impact from multiple angles.
What is the ideal MSP relationship?
Before diving into metrics, let’s briefly review how an ideal MSP relationship should function. A good MSP partner is fundamentally strategic, technologically savvy, transparent and responsive. Here’s what each of these means in greater detail:
- Strategic: A valuable MSP partner understands your core business goals, market and customers, and will align your technology stack to support short- and long-term priorities.
- Transparent: A good MSP is similarly transparent. The engagement should include regular check-in calls. Your service level agreement (SLA) should be clear, straightforward, and easy to understand. And all issues, limitations, problems and solutions should be communicated swiftly and clearly.
- Technologically-savvy: An ideal MSP’s technological solutions and recommendations are always ahead of the curve and ensure your business stays competitive and secure. MSP relationships with strong ROI are those that proactively educate and equip your team with what they need to succeed.
- Responsive: You only want to workwith an MSP that can act as a true extension of your in-house team. That means they prioritize responsiveness in all areas of their work, from technical breakdowns to emerging cybersecurityissues to planned system upgrades.
MSP providers that meet these criteria represent the gold standard, often helping their clients achieve greater productivity and profitability.
Top metrics for determining MSP ROI
You can assess the ROI of an MSP by looking at each of these characteristics in detail using qualitative and quantitative data points. This will give you a holistic view of how your MSP is impacting your business – for better or worse.
The top metrics for assessing if your MSP is setting you up for smart, strategic and long-term growth are:
- Time-to-market: Measures how fast your MSP can get new solutions up and running.
- % of IT projects completed on time/budget: Parses how effectively MSPs implement technology upgrades without cost and time overruns.
- Adoption rate: Gauges how successfully new solutions are being adopted across your business.
- Revenue and productivity growth: Tracks MSP impact on your business’s bottom line and worker productivity.
- Business continuity/disaster recovery readiness scores: This assesses your organization’s readiness to respond effectively and recover swiftly in the unfortunate event of a disaster.
After you get a sense of how effective your MSP is from a strategy perspective, you can examine transparency and responsiveness:
- Service agreement adherence: Delves into whether your MSP is meeting the obligations detailed in the service agreement signed at the beginning of the engagement.
- Review schedule: Monitors whether check-ins, cadence calls and quarterly business reviews (QBRs) are happening consistently.
- Resolutions within agreed-upon timelines: Ensures reliability and accountability by confirming that IT issues are resolved promptly within established timelines.
- Billing accuracy and clarity: This ensures MSP invoices are aligned with contracted services and conveyed in an easy-to-interpret fashion.
- Internal stakeholder satisfaction: Captures how important constituencies within your organization feel about the MSP relationship.
Lastly, you’ll want to determine your MSP’s technical chops to understand if they are putting you on competitive footing and future-proofing your tech stack:
- Number of migrations from legacy systems: Delves into how effectively your MSP is upgrading your IT environment.
- Cybersecurity audit pass rates: Analyzes the impact your MSP is having on your security posture and its ability to respond to an unpredictable threat landscape.
- End-user satisfaction: Illuminates if your MSP is enabling workers to streamline workflows and elevate productivity.
MSPs: A critical relationship that merits careful consideration
Enlisting an MSP to manage your IT is an important step that can either trip up your business or propel it to new heights. But the only way to know whether you are getting a positive ROI is by carefully assessing your MSP from various angles. By tracking whether your MSP is strategic, transparent, responsive and technically-savvy, you’ll better understand if the partnership is working and whether your MSP should remain a part of your IT team for many years to come.
