8 Steps To Take When Reviewing Your Managed IT Services

Managed IT services monitor, support and maintain your IT environment. To be truly successful, you need to regularly review these services and use the data to prepare for the future.

Review Your IT Services

Quickly browse the services you have access to and the number of users that are supported by your managed IT services; this is a good time to verify that you’re utilizing the services available to you and make any adjustment to adapt to changes in your business.

Additional Resource: Managed Services Guide: What Works For Your Business

Review Your Organization’s Use of those Services

Review a summary of the service requests that were submitted and how much time they took to resolve. Identify your top requestors, top issues and how much time was spent on proactive maintenance of your IT infrastructure. By recognizing solutions that could be implemented to reduce service tickets submitted, you will help your team save time and be more productive.

Review Response Times

Get the breakdown of the response-time (emergency, quick or normal) required of all the service tickets submitted by your organization – and see how your provider performed against your service level targets.

This will help you understand the issues occurring in your organization, and whether or not your IT provider is capable of responding as needed.

Additional Resource: 4 Reasons to Outsource IT Help Desk Services

Request a Network Health Summary

It’s just as important, or perhaps even more so, to be proactive as it is to be reactive. Check the health and usage of your servers and workstations, disk space and patching to identify anything that is outside of acceptable risk thresholds.

Proactively monitoring your environment will help identify areas for improvement and reduce the possibility of future issues.

Review Network Specialist Findings

In addition to reviewing your standard IT service and support history, it’s important to have a network specialist do a thorough review of your infrastructure on a regularly scheduled basis. They should perform a physical inspection of your server room environment, including service equipment and other infrastructure. Additionally, it is important to check battery status, anti-virus updates and conduct backup restore of test files.

This is another proactive measure to prevent issues or eliminate the possibility of error or failure.

Review Warranty Status

It’s good practice to assess the age and warranty of your servers and workstations. This step will help you understand and develop an effective equipment replacement schedule based on your warranty status and budget. If a warranty expires, you may have to pay for any maintenance required on those devices. Expired warranties may cause you to make additional unexpected investments to maintain acceptable performance.

Emergency Contact & Procedures Plan

Before beginning your managed IT services program, it’s important to document what happens in the event of a server outage – during and after business hours. Who should be contacted and how?

Then during this review, make sure everything in the plan is up-to-date and accurate. If your business hours or primary points of contact have changed, adjust the document accordingly. Then, ensure the plan is available to everyone involved to effectively respond in the event of a critical outage.

Additional Resource: Outsourced IT Help Desk Services that Boost Internal IT Productivity

Assess New Opportunities or Changes

Finally, this review is a great opportunity to pause and reflect on the past six months, and prepare for the future. Ensure your IT services plan matches the ongoing needs of your business by asking these questions:

What’s new in your business?
What are your current business challenges?
Any newly acquired companies or mergers?
Any changes in your facility/locations?
Any line of business application updates/changes?

Run Your Business More Effectively

When you proactively manage your IT infrastructure, your business can run more effectively. We recommend analyzing your managed IT services every six to twelve months; look closely at your product and service history, review new or changing business objectives and gather feedback.

At Marco, it is our goal to help our customers effectively apply technology that contributes to their success. Our Managed IT Services do just that, by keeping your people focused on running your business, while we manage the day-to-day IT maintenance and support responsibilities.

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