Is Tracking Time An Outdated Approach?
I recently had a conversation with a friend in the MSP channel. He was exploring the idea of not tracking time on tickets at all. We were exploring how much of a cultural impact entering time has on the team and how most software support groups were using simple ticket metrics to measure effectiveness rather than tracking time spent on tickets specifically. The comparison to the software as a service (SaaS) model of support I think is tempting for technology companies to replicate, but there are some substantial differences to why an IT support model is different from the product support model.
SaaS vs. IT delivery
I agree that running a SaaS helpdesk like the vendors in the support channel feels simpler. The biggest difference is important. You don’t sell support as a SaaS provider so your basis of cost modeling is departmental. Of course, you have a support department for your software, but the relative cost of that group compared to the other parts of the company, like development, would be much smaller. In an MSP the support IS the product.
This means as much data as you can have about it the better. SaaS providers obsess over CAGR, CAC, Churn, Engagement, and all kinds of deep metrics about how their customers interact with their products. In the same way, an MSP should be obsessing over metrics that tell them how their service is being consumed. These are the things that tell you it’s working or not.
The platforms aren’t modernized
There is growing attention to companies that service their clients through Slack and other non-traditional ticket-based helpdesk models. You could argue they’ve even advanced past the client portal system and are simply embedded in the workflow of the end-users.
I can certainly appreciate why this is desirable. Many of the ticketing systems in the channel are far from modern. They are clunky, dated, and create a high level of friction to enter and find the data the techs are looking for. So if there is a discussion to be had, it’s that the PSA vendors need to completely re-think and potentially rebuild their platforms from the ground up to make them easier and faster to interface with. Both for the sake of the tech as well as the end-user client that is being supported.
Time entry is painful
I get the pull to not doing time entry, it’s a never-ending battle. This is not unique to IT either. I see similar struggles with wanting to do away with time entry in the DevOps space as well.
Any type of Professional Services (PS) delivery team accountants, lawyers, consultants, they all face the same issue of having to do timesheets, but everyone arguing about why they don’t want to do it. It’s not fun, but that’s not the point. It’s effective at measuring value contribution and ultimately that serves all parties. Time entry is a requirement of running a mature business that has objective visibility to value creation and profitability when human effort is the value being sold. That goes for most knowledge-based industries.
Time entry shouldn’t be painful
The best way to get compliance with time entry is to make it effortless. Most time entry is brutally overbearing!
I look at the 80/20 rule here. If someone logs 6hrs of their 8hrs a day at work, that’s enough. I don’t need a 15-minute time entry, I certainly don’t need 5m time entries. The details about where the extra 2hrs went are just administrative overhead, which will be captured in ballooned admin hrs as a bucket. If I need to I can work with individuals to determine how that time is being spent.
Some will push back and say, "It’s a lot of work.” Yes, and no. Again, most organizations are doing this part ALL wrong! If you structure frictionless processes and configure your tools correctly time management should take very little effort from Individuals OR mgmt. This is such a common issue I built a 101 class to offer the staff of clients of mine, so I would stop having these same conversations about time management and why it’s necessary. https://training.evolvedmgmt.com/courses/msp-productivity-accelerator
Quiet clients matter too
“What about the clients that where time is not being logged?“ Quiet clients are an AM issue more than a helpdesk issue anyway. If you’re pulling over 70% margin on any account, you better be comfortable with the value you are creating for them. You should express the same level of interest in the clients generating over 70% margin as you should in the clients that are less than 20%.
Measuring Profitability
Profitability measurement on a month to month basis is often meaningless. True, but trends are important. I really don’t care if a client’s monthly profitability tanks, but someone should have a good reason why. Again this is about situational awareness and acting on exceptions.
If it’s one month out of three that is a problem then who cares and move on.
If it’s every other month that is down and the three-month trend is terrible. There need to be some eyes on that client and a plan around determining why the profit margin targets are below target.
Situational awareness as a manager/leader is critical to making timely and informed decisions.
Time isn’t everything
One metric on its own is useless. A tapestry of metrics that help you ask better questions. That is valuable.
It’s important to watch time as a lead indicator to a bunch of other metrics, but the time itself is never a metric to be understood in isolation.
Time as an exception can be very informative though. A metric I teach my clients to watch is expensive tickets. Any ticket with more than 4hrs on it. You should keep an eye on and ensure the team is driving it to resolution. This is preferable to finding out that someone spent 15hrs on some ticket because they had to do a bunch of vendor research and work weekends to test patches to an LOB software that is actually out of scope. Stuff like this happens all the time where people leak large amounts of time. This is far more expensive and problematic than 5 or 10 minutes of peer support questions. That time entry may get missed because the person getting looped in on a question for 10 minutes doesn’t code their time against that ticket and it ends up in the admin bucket as lost time.
Time entry misses the backend work
“Time entry doesn’t capture the full cost of support so it’s misleading. What about all the work we do on the backend through central platforms?”
Now granted some may be using the RMM to attach time to tickets, which would offset this issue, but I would suggest that this approach isn’t typical. Even without the central administration time being captured against a specific client. The impact should be visible and tangible.
Centralized Services (Central Services is an industry term for the RRM, AV, backup elements of the business. All the centrally managed platforms that touch all of the clients) should be an efficiency positive cost in the service department. This means you should see value being delivered to the department that outweighs the direct cost of maintaining the centralized services work. These central management pieces are distributed costs, so it’s not like one client would take a larger % of cost relative to their support agreements.
Changing AVs for example really isn’t the client’s choice, you make that for them. The fact that you hit each client is a reflection of the departmental cost, not the client directly.
If there are direct costs that are much larger for one client than another, it’s likely that there is some proactive work that needs to be done on that client. Maybe there’s an outstanding project opportunity that could correct that time sink issue.
Emotional Cost of Client
Emotional cost or as I call it PITA, Pain In The Ass factor. Should be costed into the agreement in some fashion. In the MPS that I ran, we would charge problematic clients more regardless of the profitability. If they didn’t feel the relationship was valuable I was often fine with them leaving if they were really a nightmare. The team would do up a list each quarter of 5 five clients they loved and the 5 client “shit list.” The shit list was my barometer to refer to when I was trying to save a client or talk them down off a problem. If they were on the shit list I knew I shouldn’t fight as hard in some cases.
Account Management Cost
The account manager (AM) can be considered SGnA in some cases, or you view their salary cost as overhead and hopefully track them to show they produce the relative value to the revenue under management, or they carry a quota of some sort that makes their cost irrelevant. Salespeople are allergic to process and procedure in most cases. The idea that AMs will log all their time is crazy. It’s nice if they log some, like major meetings TBRs, project reviews, etc.
AMs also have other metrics that will be core to demonstrating their value contribution.
The future of time tracking
I agree it would be nice to not have to track our time. Hopefully, apps improve to have machine learning functions like the O365 time monitor agent, or rescue time to determine how your time is spent instead of having to track it manually.
That said, time tracking when done well is not a burden so heavy it will cripple your culture. ;)
Cultural differentiation
Culture is an important thing to develop, but I have seen time and time again that people are willing to record their time as much as is sane and justifiable.
Tracking your 15-minute bathroom break and 42m lunch hour is dumb, in fact, straight-up abusive.
This not what defines a company culture though. I work with several companies where time accountability is really high and they have awesome highly engaged staff. In many cases, I have advised clients to fire staff that refuses to get on board. They struggle with it, but after a period of being unaccountable to a simple requirement of your job, it becomes professional insubordination.
Time management should be done because you’re a professional and it’s a requirement of your job.
Time entry also shouldn’t be administratively painful. Find the balance of 80/20 and get the culture to buy-in based on WHY it’s important and you all win.
Time entry as a differentiator?
How much of a cultural problem in entering time? Would you be willing to be paid less if it meant that you didn’t have to enter time? Not that you would pay less, instead it’s a thought experiment to how much value you would place on not entering time.
The trade-off for me is much more about working for a group of professionals that take their work seriously and management that recognizes the boat anchor that inefficient time entry can be.
Culture is a tricky thing to foster, but you can absolutely have an amazing company culture while still running a metrics-based business that understands how it manages the cost of value delivery.
Time Entry Isn’t The Bad Guy
In summary, it’s true the way we track and manage time is broken. There is a multi-million dollar opportunity to leverage machine learning to simply understand how we are using our time. Rescue Time for example is great at knowing what you’re doing on your computer, but it doesn’t go deep enough to understand the context of what you’re working on. Imagine if your PSA knew what client assets you were working on as you moved through several tools. There is surely enough metadata there for it to learn what clients you were supporting based on what tools, networks, and assets you touched while you were working.
So if you feel that time entry is such an evil process in your company that it isn’t worth doing anymore, I’m interested to hear your feedback about how that experiment goes. Maybe I’m just too data-driven to willingly give up on having the information that time entry produces. It’s not that you can’t run a decent business without it, I simply feel that time tracking isn’t the bad guy you’re looking for. Our industry needs further disruption to modernize the platforms we work on. It’s nowhere near done maturing.
