This procedure covers the standard "routine" for a technician. Before you get into any details, please note one critically important thing: The point of all of this process is to


By "interrupt driven" I simply mean that you allow yourself to be interrupted and therefore end up doing whatever interrupted you most recently. This is so important that I've addressed it in several books and many times in my blog. It's a simple phrase and a very difficult concept to implement. Just like exercise, if you get out of the habit of non-interruption for a few days, it can take some work to get back on track.

We allow ourselves to be interrupted by the telephone. How often is the telephone call more important than what you were doing? 2% of the time? We allow Outlook to pop up and beg for our attention. Then we have to go back to work. We let instant messengers from three different channels pop up and grab our attention. We check Facebook, Twitter, and our cell phones non-stop as if the world might actually end and we'd miss it.

With luck, you are very busy with lots of service requests. If not, I hope you will be soon!
When you have a busy service board, it is important to make sure that you don't lose something "between the cracks." Here's a process to take care of that and then attack any boacklog that may exist. Please note: A backlog is not bad! It's better to know that all your techs are busy than to have pockets of inactivity.

This process is to be completed by the Tech Support Manager/Service Manager or the Service Coordinator. It should be somebody that can make decisions to re-allocate resources to get tickets un-stuck and moving toward completion.

The Service Board needs constant attention, but the complete process of prioritizing, assigning and scheduling resources really needs to be done at most two or three times a week. Early Monday AM is a must and toward the end of the week is good to help bring the next week into focus. See

IT Consultants Poised to Get Rich with Cloud Services

My target audience is small businesses. There's an interesting pattern with small businesses and competition. On one hand, many small businesses do not think about their competition enough, or in the right way. On the other hand, small businesses tend to identify their competition completely wrong. By that I mean that they name someone as their competition who doesn't even know they exist.

Several thoughts here . . .

First, how much should you think about your competition?

Second, how do you properly identify your competition?

Third, ignore the "big guys" as much as they ignore you.

Let me tell you a story in very broad strokes that represents what I've seen small businesses do over and over.

I had a client who developed a very cool new product. It made an important process available at a price low enough to bring lots of new clients into the market. No one else appeared to be working on a similar product. In fact, the industry was completely dominated by REALLY BIG players. The two biggest players were owned by IBM and General Electric. And their clientele were literally the biggest companies in the world. This new product would provide critical services to a much broader audience. It would create a new sector of the business that did not exist before.

Every Managed Service Provider has three big categories of work that need to be performed: Billable, Covered by MSA, and Internal.

So the question before us today is: In what order should you do this work? And, more specifically, should you schedule truly billable work first? Let's assume for now that you will make internal work a low priority unless there's an important task or project that just needs to get done.

For purposes of this discussion we will only talk about:

1) MSA Work: Work that is "prepaid" or covered by a managed service agreement. Your company has already received the payment for this. Now you just need to provide the work.

and

2) Billable Work: Work for which the client will receive an additional invoice. This is work not covered by a managed service agreement.

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