I’ve struggled with this question for the last couple years and it is one that gets thrown at me any time I speak at a workshop or conference. For me, the answer is still a resounding YES!
Even with the advent of automatic updates and backups and remote monitoring, solutions still need to be implemented. Of course putting time against a contract reduces its profitability, but what are you going to do? Ignore the issue in order to avoid putting time onto the agreement? Of course not.
The whole point of measuring utilization has always been to track how many client facing hours engineers put towards clients for billing. The only difference with managed services is that we’ve been prepaid for those potential hours. Time will still need to put towards clients networks and we as managers, owners, and sales people must keep the client base large enough for their to be enough networks to work on. Hopefully each individual network needs less touch but does that mean we want techs sitting around? Definitely not, it means go out and find MORE networks for them to maintain. Low utilization STILL means that we are losing production out of our staff.
We also can not forget about projects! Sales should be out filling the pipeline and queue with new projects that are what? BILLED BY THE HOUR OR FLAT FEE! That means billable hours that need to be tracked and measured to determine production levels of our engineers.
Don’t throw the baby out with the bath water folks. Keep measuring utilization. Add to that some strong analysis of time on task and efficiencies of implementing solutions. Now more than ever you need your engineers working smartly and efficiently on solving client issues. If you’re not hitting 75% utilization look at your sales pipeline, bring in more clients until you can fully utilize your engineering team.
More on this topic later…it’s a big one and there are many more factors such as fudging time sheets, loading time against agreements, etc…all real issues and all incredibly simple to combat! Let me know what you think?
Tags: managed services, time sheets, utilization
