Improve Incident and Problem Management of MSPs

Your incident and problem response plan must be aligned and effective for all your clients.

Analyst Perspective

Respond to incidents seamlessly and guard the future of your clients

Incident and problem management are one of the core IT services within the service desk that Technology Services/MSPs (managed service providers) provide to their clients. They play a critical role for MSPs in becoming trusted partners. Often, not enough attention and effort have been paid by MSPs to improve incident and problem management due to multiple challenges and obstacles. Unaddressed challenges can result in the loss of untapped opportunities for business growth, better customer experience, and more revenue with better profit margins. Also, the value that incident and problem management offer clients has not been emphasized and minted.

To improve incident and problem management, MSPs must focus on three areas:

1. People: Build a team of the right people with the right soft and technical skills and training.
2. Processes/Workflows: Emphasis on improving and implementing standard operating procedures and guidelines at various steps.
3. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs): Know what key metrics are essential to meet the client's expectations and performance.

Improvement in these areas enables MSPs to successfully deliver high-quality IT services while complying with Service Level Agreements (SLAs) for different industry vertical clients. Overall, this storyboard will help MSPs build improved incident and problem management that will be efficient, effective, and aligned with clients' requirements.

Brijesh Kumar, PhD
Research Specialist, Industry Practice
Info-Tech Research Group

Executive Summary

Challenge

The common challenges of MSPs are:

• Lack of proper skill sets and training of incident response team.
• Inefficient communication with clients, end-users, or stakeholders during incident resolution.
• Lack of standardized guidelines or procedures to handle and resolve incidents.
• Ineffective root cause analysis due to improper course of actions.
• Lack of scalability to meet the increased demand for incident resolution and problem solution.

Obstacles

• Lack of soft and technical skills suitable to roles and responsibilities.
• Absence of framework or workflows to implement processes and policies.
• Lack of latest incident and problem management tools with automation and artificial intelligence ability.
• Shortage of technical expertise and headcounts.

Info-Tech Approach

This storyboard will help you to:

• Understand why organizations outsource their incident and problem management and what are their expectations.
• Build a robust incident and problem management team with the right skill sets.
• Develop standardized procedures and mechanisms and monitor KPIs to establish effective and efficient incident and problem management.

Info-Tech Insight

Organizations outsource their IT services (incident and problem management) to stay focused on their business products and services. To deliver exceptional IT services, MSPs must develop highly efficient & effective incident and problem management, ensuring the delivery of IT services with the minimum interruption to their client in the current dynamic technology-driven market.

Insight summary

For MSPs, incident and problem management provide an opportunity to become a trusted partner in IT.

MSPs play a crucial role and are perceived as essential business partners by their clients because they provide client businesses with seamless IT services. Incident and problem management within the service desk or IT service management is one of the essential IT services that organizations outsource to MSPs. Improved incident and problem management aid in customers experiencing uninterrupted IT services; if there is a disruption in the services, they are resolved quickly with the least business damage.

IT services disruptions are unavoidable, but how incidents are managed is in the control of MSPs.

Organizations are more dynamic than ever before, and IT holds a decisive position in every aspect of business operations. Disruption of IT services happens, and the quality of IT services is often affected. Incident management's primary role is to restore the affected IT service quickly, reducing the damage and the impact on the business. The incident response team responds to incidents and must be equipped with the right skills, procedures, and workflows to resolve the incident effectively and efficiently. Proficient handling of incidents by MSPs elevates client satisfaction and experience.

Problem management adds value to MSPs clients.

Once an incident is resolved, problem management comes into play to ensure the same incident does not recur and the client's business has few to no IT services disruptions. Problem management is mostly about adding value to clients by leveraging root-cause analysis to find and fix the cause of the incident. Problem management is also about being proactive in resolving incidents that may happen in the future. The maturity of problem management is proportional to value delivery and can be leveraged by MSPs to differentiate themselves from peers in the competitive market.

MSPs are positioned for growth

Organizations across industries extend critical IT services to MSPs.

Managed service providers (MSPs) market

Global SMB IT spend: $1.2 billion
2019-2023 CAGR: 4.6%

Global MSP managed: $137 billion
2019-2023 CAGR: 16.4%

MSPs' global market is growing rapidly at a CAGR of 16.4% between 2019-2023. This growth is a result of digital transformation, outsourcing IT services, and focus on strategic technology initiatives.

Source: Alpha Sense Inc., 2021

Organizations turning to MSPs

More than 60% of businesses are dependent on MSPs for their IT services, strategies, and initiatives to stay competitive and ahead of competitors.

Source: GlobeNewswire, 2022

MSPs' mainstays service offerings

IT Service desk (incident & problem management), network and cloud services are the top three services offered by MSPs, especially to SMB-sized companies which outsource their IT services to a third party.

Source: CompTIA, 2022

MSPs' clients lack active incident plan

96% of MSP's clients do not have an active incident response plan reported by the Kaseya survey. This indicates significant business opportunities for MSPs.

Source: Channel Insider, 2022

Incident and problem management is essential to organizations

Business stakeholders rank the service desk as one of the most important IT services.

Important IT services for business stakeholders

Important IT services for business stakeholders

1. Network and comm. infrastructure
2. IT security
3. Service desk (incident & problem management)
4. Data quality
5. Business application
6. Devices
7. Client-facing technology
8. Analytical capabilities
9. IT innovation leadership
10. Work orders
11. Projects
12. IT policies
13. Requirement gathering

Info-Tech's CIO Business Vision diagnostic helps businesses identify the importance of business stakeholders' satisfaction with core IT services to the organization.

Learn more about the CIO Business Vision Program

Organizations outsource the incident and problem management

There are many benefits to outsourcing the incident and problem management.

Outsourcing advantages

• Bring in expertise and knowledge needed to handle incident and its cause according to best-practice guidelines.
• Reduce the impact of incidents through effective damage containment.
• Save on costs for hiring technical and engineers to manage the incidents and associated problems.
• Mitigate damage/threats due to IT service disruptions and proactively fix the cause of those disruptions.
• Strengthen relationships between IT and business through service level improvement.
• Insurance and liability transfer to the MSP in certain incidents if MSP fails to mitigate the threats related to the incident.
• Flexibility to focus on multiple incidents and problems in a priority fashion.
• Reduce timelines for incident response and resolution.
• Expand coverage hours and access points to better handle the number of incidents at any time.
• Improve end-user satisfaction through the efficient resolution of incidents and fixing the root cause of incidents.
• Minimize the impact of security incidents through damage containment and quick fix of the issue.
• Prevent the recurrence of similar security incidents or full-blown security by fixing the root cause of incidents.

Outsourcing disadvantages

• Risk of additional threat vector if an MSP does not have stringent security measures and is vulnerable to security threats.
• Potential misalignment of incident response team with customer's business goals and corporate culture.
• Communication issues arise when customers cannot report an incident with the desired communication channel.
• Less or no control over incidents and problem management process.
• Potential lower customer satisfaction due to inefficient handling of incidents and delivery not up to expectations.
• Lack of in-depth industry knowledge for certain incidents and technical problems.

"The two big challenges for organizations are lack of a single source of truth and a holistic perspective of incidents on business impact. This is where outsourcing incident and problem management can help organizations to overcome the challenges."
– Kevin Martin, CEO, CirrusPoint Solutions

MSPs struggle to optimize their incident and problem management

MSPs face challenges that impact the competency of incident and problem management.

One in four SMBs would leave their IT provider for service quality issues.

Top issues with MSPs:

• 48% of survey respondents cited performance issues (e.g. slowness or freezing) with the devices under MSP management.
• 33% cited outages or unplanned system reboots.
• 80%: Suffered at least one security incident.

Source: Action1, 2022

Understand incident and problem management terminologies

Avoid confusion while using the four most often spoken terms of the service desk.

Source: BMC, 2020

MSPs service desk encompasses incident and problem management

Incidents reported by clients must go through incident and problem management.

A lifecycle approach: Incident management

1. Incident logging
2. Ticket creation
3. Incident classification
4. Incident diagnosis
5. Incident resolution
6. Incident closure

Model of an MSP service desk

"Technicians must understand the tension that exists between the goals of the incident management process and the problem management process. Incident management is all about service restoration, whereas problem management is about root cause determination. The temptation to perform root cause analysis in the heat of the incident needs to be tempered against the priority to restore service first and investigate its cause later."
– Fred Chagnon, Principal Research Director, Info-Tech Research Group

A lifecycle approach: Problem management

1. Problem identification
2. Problem control
3. Error control

Adopt a holistic approach to resolve incidents

Every incident must be taken seriously and resolved through incident and problem management.

Reported incidents can be related to software, hardware, network, internet, server, security, data etc. Some incidents are detected proactively by monitoring systems.

MSP Service Desk

Reported incidents can be related to software, hardware, network, internet, server, security, data etc. Some incidents are detected proactively by monitoring systems.

Most incidents with a low or moderate impact can be resolved at the service desk or by the incident management team. Critical incidents that have a significant impact on clients' businesses get escalated and may end up activating a business continuity or disaster recovery plan.

Info-Tech Insight

No incident is minor. Often, incidents disrupt IT services or deliver good-quality IT services for one or more end-users at the client site. An MSP must have a framework or plan to address all kinds of incidents, which are from low to critical urgency and localized to extensive impact, reported by clients through different communication channels.

Skills are key to handling incidents proficiently

For MSPs, soft and technical skills are critical for the incident management team.

Soft skills

• Customer service
• Communication
• Ability to learn quickly
• Troubleshooting
• Work under pressure
• Adaptability
• Teamwork
• Interpersonal
• Support experience
• Integrity

Specific skills

• Solve complex issues
• Continuously improve in an agile way
• Contribute to quality, automation initiatives, and shift-left strategy,
• Capability to use all channels and ITSM tools
• Deep technical knowledge of specific topic/tier support

Knowledge context

• Knowledge and expertise in different industry verticals
• Impact of service disruption on the customer's business
• Understand clients' values, mission, vision and goals
• Critical key times or peak periods for certain systems

Source: LinkedIn Learning, 2021

"For MSPs, it is vital for the incident response team to have enough technical knowledge and experience to resolve incidents, reactively or proactively. The right set of skills enables the incident team to resolve clients' incidents quickly with the least business interruptions."
– Devendra Singh Baghel,
Solution Architect,
ECLEVA

The roles and responsibilities of the incident management team

Each member of incident management must understand and have defined responsibilities.

The problem management team may share roles and responsibilities

Sharing the role and responsibility between the problem and incident management team depends upon MSPs' maturity level.

Roles and responsibilities

Roles and responsibilities differ in MSPs

	Matured MSPs have different incident and management teams and do not share roles and responsibilities.
	Partially matured MSPs have different incident and management teams and share some roles and responsibilities.
	Immature MSPs have one team of incident and management and share roles and responsibilities.

Recommendations to create a resilient incident response team

Building an effective and efficient incident response team is imperative for MSPs to respond to a wide range of incidents.

An MSP should have a best-of-breed incident response team

1. Manager support to incident response team
   • The incident manager understands the requirement of the right set of skills to respond to incidents and assists the incident response team develop processes and guidelines, allowing them to be effective in incident handling.
2. Strong collaboration and communication
   • The incident response team should have strong internal collaboration and communication channels with clients/end-users/stakeholders, enabling the team to take relevant actions promptly.
3. Diverse skill sets
   • The incident response team must be equipped with diverse skills to allow incident response team members to specialize in multiple areas of incidents, especially to prevent burnout of the team members.
4. Solid IT background
   • Strong IT and cybersecurity knowledge enables the incident response team to adapt quickly, minimize IT service disruption for clients, and contain the damage due to incidents.
5. Proper incident training
   • MSP should conduct regular training and testing incident response workflow, ensuring the team works together effectively and efficiently and confirming they are ready to react quickly in any incident.

Build a succinct incident communication plan with your client

Sharing necessary incident information keeps the client well-informed and prepared.

1. Detect and raise an incident
2. Confirm receipt of incident
   • Start communicating with clients/end-user to acknowledge the incident reported by the user.
   • Use different channels to communicate with the client (chat room, video chat, live incident state document).
3. Assess the incident
4. Communicate next steps
   • Confirm incidents and communicate with an incident response team as required.
   • Communicate the steps to end-users about the incident and its resolution time based on the agreed SLA with the client/end-users. SLA can be varied for different customers.
5. Escalate the incident
6. Communicate plan to resolve
   • Send escalation information updates to clients and impacted end-users with the current situation and estimated resolution time.
   • Provide alternative solutions or methods to affected end-users if there are any to mitigate the impact on the client's business and its operation.
7. Resolve and close
8. Communicate incident closure and request feedback
   • Confirm the incident is resolved and get the experience and satisfaction feedback from end-users.
   • Update the internal staff as well since it builds consistency in sharing the latest update and information about the resolved incident.

Info-Tech Insight

Quick and accurate communication with clients helps MSPs build trust and cooperation in reducing the impact of affected IT services on clients' business operations. It also diminishes the possibility of customers having unpleasant experiences and dissatisfaction during incident handling and resolution.

Improve incident routing and reporting with an effective classification scheme

A classification scheme enhances the handling of incidents by the incident response team.

• Concise, easy to navigate, and easy to maintain are traits of a well-thought-out classification scheme.
• Too many options confuse; too few options provide little value.
• Resolving tickets efficiently requires reliable reporting for tickets, which depends on an effective categorization scheme.
• Call routing and reporting requirements should be your guide while building a classification scheme.

Best practices for a classification scheme to keep in mind

1. Exhaustive and exclusive
   • The classification scheme must be exhaustive and mutually exclusive. There must be a place for every ticket; every ticket fits only in one place.
2. Actual IT assets or services
   • Ensure the categories in the classification scheme describe the asset or service based on the final resolution, not how it was reported initially.
3. Ticket templates
   • Pre-populated ticket templates with important categories can significantly improve ticket reporting and routing accuracy.
4. Tiered system
   • Using a tiered system to classify categories makes navigation easier for agents to select ticket categories.
5. Miscellaneous categories
   • Avoid having miscellaneous categories in the classification scheme; otherwise, a decent portion of tickets will end up there.

Download Improve Incident and Problem Management

Align incident prioritization scheme with the client's business requirements

Most IT leaders agree that prioritization is one of the challenging aspects of IT in general. Always set priorities based on the needs of the client's business.

Priority = Impact x Urgency

Urgency = how soon the incident must be resolved

Impact = the effect of the incident

Info-Tech Insight

Often MSPs have clients from different industry verticals, which usually have varied prioritization for the same or similar incidents. MSPs must have customized prioritization schemes for their clients based on their business and industry requirements.

Example of incident prioritization

Download Incident Management and Service Desk SOP

Define incident response and resolution time to establish service-level objectives (SLO) for clients

Keeping response and resolution time low is crucial for high customer satisfaction.

• MSPs must communicate incident response, resolution and escalation time to their clients clearly in service level agreements (SLA):
  
  • Response time: Time from when the incident record is created to the time that you confirm receipt and assignment.
    
  • Resolution time: Time from when the incident record is created to the time the customer has been notified that it is resolved.
    
  • Escalation time: Maximum time that ticket should be worked on without resolution progress before escalating.
    
• Map various types of incidents into an incident timeline to validate whether you would be able to resolve these incidents for your clients from numerous industry verticals.
  
• Defining SLA enables MSPs to achieve high client satisfaction and a better experience. Multiple factors are crucial to build a successful SLA, aligning the expectation of both the parties, the client, and the MSP.

Example SLO and escalation timelines

Download Incident Management and Service Desk SOP

Leverage the shift-left strategy to resolve incidents efficiently

For MSPs, implementation of the shift-left strategy lowers operational costs, reduces resolution time, and elevates end-user satisfaction.

Shift-left strategy:

• Reduce tickets: MSPs can reduce the number of tickets by implementing self-service automation to resolve common incidents. MSP should train clients/end-users on using self-service for generic incidents from clients.
• Reduce escalations: MSPs resolve more incidents by empowering the MSP tier 1 support team to perform tier 2 tasks. This will eliminate the need to escalate common or similar incidents to tier 2 or 3 specialists or engineers, reducing overall operating costs to resolve incidents and increasing client satisfaction.
• Resolve quickly: MSPs knowledge base documents help self-service, end-users, and tier 1 support resolves the incidents fast. Analyzing common incidents and notes around them in response to incidents is the key to building knowledge base documents.

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