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Hey Reader! How do you plan for contingencies in your projects? My project scoping calculator adds 10% contingency to all projects. If you have a project with 40 related tasks, you're guaranteed to run into problems. As my guest on a new podcast episode put it, "It's septillion times more likely that the sun won't rise tomorrow than all your projects go off without a hitch." Pretty terrible odds. So you better do something about it. At the very least, you should just plan for problems. I...
Hey Reader, how would you rate your use of KPIs? I find MSPs are usually in two camps. 1. KPIs Yes! Insights? No. 🙁 Most MSPs have some KPIs in place, but they usually don't find them that helpful. Quite often this is because the KPIs don't tell them anything about what's happening around them, or people feel they don't reflect the reality of their day-to-day. KPIs are not a set it and forget it kind of thing. You need to constantly review, adjust, remove, add, and question what the KPIs are...
Hey Reader! Your tier 1 team isn't slow. They're stuck. Here's the pattern I see in too many MSPs: Tier 1 gets a complex ticket. They spend 2-3 hours searching for solutions. They try fixes that don't work. Finally, they escalate after burning half the day. Tier 2 solves it in 15 minutes. The real problem isn't skill level. It's the lack of clear escalation boundaries. Use the 30-minute rule. Set a hard 30-minute limit for tier 1 troubleshooting. After 30 minutes, automatic escalation. No...