Technology in business can be a hard subject for management to tackle.
More often than not, management teams stand at the revolving door of receiving and signing-off recommended changes – that’s if you are lucky enough to have a competent Managed Service Provider (MSP) making you aware of them in the first place.
If you are left feeling uneasy or uncertain about your company’s use of technology then you’re in luck, there is a way to fix this!
From my experience providing and supporting solutions over the years, the most successful companies, in whatever their specialised field may be, have the steps mastered.
Let’s start from the top with identifying your needs and goals. Ah yes, goals, who could have guessed this would be first.
Defining your objectives and prioritising your needs is where your own expertise in your own specialised field makes you valuable in this process. No one knows your industry like you. Your focus here is determining what you want to achieve with your technology; this could be anything from productivity to communication.
Once you have these locked down then prioritise and rank them while being as detailed as possible. Now you can use your defined goals to evaluate your current technology.
The first step in this evaluation is to discuss the performance of your current systems with your staff. Keep a keen ear out for words like “crashing”, “lagging” or any other repeating issues.
Now identify if there are key features missing from your systems that you have dreamed about. Features are what are built on top of the core functionality of your systems such as good, clean reporting, integrations with other systems or emailing directly from your system. Just like when setting goals, use your own expertise here too to determine what features are important to you and your business.
During this process, beware of confusing performance and features, with user experience, which is an important factor but does need to be discussed with your team separately.
User experience should be defined by how user-friendly the system is, does the layout make sense and how easy it is for people to do their daily tasks.
Now that you have armed yourself with clear goals and have carried out the evaluation, you can proceed with finding the right solution.
Start with doing your own research if you prefer. A good start is to look into user reviews as you may find that you are not the only one trying to achieve these goals with the same systems.
Alternatively, you could investigate new systems as potential replacements to your own, to achieve the goals you set. Taking advantage of trial periods, demos, and looking into user reviews of alternatives are good ways to understand what else is out there.
Finally, seek professional advice. MSPs can guide you through this process, mediate with providers and give crucial advice in areas you may have not yet thought about. These can be areas like assessing support quality from the vendor. This is key to keeping uptime as close to 100% as possible.
MSPs can also help maintain licensing and access, certificates, domain records and provide maintenance, so you can focus on what’s more important in your business. Any good MSP’s goal, after all, is to help its customers achieve success.
Related: It’s the end of the world as we know it (and I feel fine)
