Are You Spending Too Much Time on End-User Support? Here's How to Tell

There's no doubt about it, end-user support is essential. Whether your business is small, medium or enterprise, day-to-day support has to happen. This includes patches, upgrades and troubleshooting, all of which work to keep everything in your business functioning as it should. But when your IT resources are taken up by this day-to-day support, who is future-proofing your infrastructure? 

2 Signs You're Spending Too Much Time on End-User Support 

While essential, end-user support can also be a drain on internal IT resources. Here are two ways to uncover if this problem is taking its toll on your organization.

Are You Missing IT Project Deadlines/Initiatives?

Setting an IT project deadline and hitting an IT project deadline are two very different things. When your internal IT department cannot dedicate their time and efforts toward preparing for and executing software updates, hardware upgrades or content migrations on time because they're too busy "keeping the lights on," it's a sign that providing end-user support is pulling their focus from high-level initiatives. 

Are You STuck in a Reactive Position?

Beyond functioning on the day-to-day, businesses have to focus on the future. The pace of business and business technology is too fast for anyone to sit back and take things as they come. What I see all too often are business leaders who are approaching their internal IT to tell them which direction the company is moving in, leaving the IT team scrambling to figure out if their current infrastructure can support this new direction.

Ideally, it should be a company's IT department who brings strategic initiatives to leadership, not the other way around. But with end-user support consuming the available IT resources, they have no choice but to put off bringing large-scale value to their organization. 

When IT is left in a reactive position, they end up caught in a never-ending game of catch-up, which only lengthens the time when a business operates with inadequate infrastructure. 

How Managed IT Services Can Help

Managed IT Services take over the management of day-to-day end-user support so internal IT staff can focus on researching and implementing strategic initiatives like infrastructure improvements and software migrations. They can focus on determining what your organization's cloud strategy should be and how to keep your business ahead of the curve. Managed IT Services gives organizations of all sizes the support and resources they need to take a proactive approach, instead of staying reactive. 

Many organizations function without a ticketing system, or they have a ticketing system their employees don't abide by. This leaves the organization with a lack of data to drive their decision-making. Even enterprise organizations who have implemented ticketing systems often find that employees go around them and instead call, email and stop by the desks of their IT staff in order to make requests or notify them of issues. 

Alternatively, Managed IT Services eliminates any opportunities for employees to seek IT support without submitting a ticket. The only way they can receive help is by participating in the ticketing system. As a result, there is always a detailed record of who is having what problem and how the problem was solved. 

Additionally, this ticketing helps alert organizations to software and infrastructure problems they otherwise might not have known they have. If a particular problem keeps resurfacing, your managed IT provider will identify this trend, notify you of it and provide recommendations for how it can be alleviated. 

So, not only does Managed IT Services give your business the support it needs to focus on strategic initiatives, it also provides the data you need to ensure the strategic initiatives you move forward with are actually solving the problems your organization faces.