So many projects, so little time and resources. How do you as a business process owner fulfill your charter to drive productivity and efficiency, when you have to queue your project up and gain support from IT and other internal teams? Like you, IT, dev ops, cloud ops and other support teams have their own long, prioritized list of projects and requests from multiple teams across your organization. We've been asked many times over the years for advice, guidance, and tips to "make the case" for managed services - and so, here is a short synopsis of how to make the business case for managed services so you can get your 'to do list' done.
Managed Services, Revisited
Most business process professionals and IT teams know what managed services are, given the outsourcing of IT and infrastructure started back in the 80’s and 90’s, and surged in adoption as the number of SaaS platforms flourished over the similar time frame. But, like SaaS platforms, managed services offerings have advanced well beyond standard maintenance and high availability uptime to now include a range of valuable programs that historically would have been additionally charged services:
- Extended & Preferential Support: Vendors investing in managed services offerings now offer global support across chat, email, phone, fax, and social channels, many now 24x7x365. Certain vendors provide clients with dedicated communications channels (like Slack), priority queuing in support channels, text-based status notifications, and direct access to named support managers to ensure the highest level of service and response.
- Dedicated Teams: Managed services today typically come with fractional or, if desired, full-time support leads such as a Support Engineer, Customer Success Manager, or Technical Account manager to ensure coverage, continuity, with continuous communications, onboarding and training on new releases. Quarterly business reviews are typical to evaluate metrics and overall account progress.
- Dedicated Knowledge Portals & Learning Centers: Investing in managed services, opens up access to a content and educational materials not made available to the wider customer base. The provider’s knowledge portal or learning center can house technical documentation, release notes, how-to videos, persona-based learning journeys, certification programs, APIs, and other content Many knowledge portals have very helpful self-service capabilities if your CSM or TAM is not immediately available.
