Stephanie Hurd

By: Stephanie Hurd on September 20th, 2021

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Co-Managed IT Services: MSPs and Internal IT Working Together

Technology Strategy | Business Strategy | Outsourced IT Support

You have a capable IT team, but projects seem to drag on forever. Plus, you never have time to optimize your technology or plan for improvements because day-to-day support consumes all your attention. You outsource some specialized functions, but a third party can't completely take tasks off your plate when they require assistance from your team to gain network information and access.

You're familiar with the managed service model and know MSPs can provide the expertise you need. But MSPs usually want to replace IT departments, not help them. You need a partner, not a competitor.

This is where co-managed IT services come in. With co-managed IT, you add to the capacity and expertise of your IT team by partnering with an MSP.

A co-managed service provider can:

  • Fill in skill gaps.
  • Eliminate key person dependencies.
  • Take overflow work off your plate.
  • Offer enterprise-grade solutions that expand and contract as your needs change. Examples: ticketing systems, documentation systems, network mapping, etc. that are not cost-effective for a team of your size to purchase directly.

A true co-managed partnership offers a seamless experience to your end-users and peace of mind to your team.

Not all MSPs want to replace internal IT departments.

We'll get to the details of how a co-managed partnership works, but let's get one thing straight. Co-managed service providers do not want to take your job.

To be perfectly honest about this point, Innovative was not always a great partner for internal IT teams. We didn't offer any services under the "co-managed" label until recent years. For a long time, we avoided working with businesses that had their own IT department. When we worked with internal IT people, we expected them to stay in their lane of very specialized business applications or sold them a block of hours to use our team in a pinch. Still, we did not stay actively involved in their overall strategy.

In more recent years, some excellent internal IT teams showed us how effective partnering with them could be. Over the past five years, some of our most successful client relationships have been with internal IT teams. They've leaned on us to help drive overall strategy, push technology adoption, security prioritization, and supplement their internal resources with specific types of support and services.

So, no, we don't want your job. But don't take it from us. Check out our friend Bob Coppedge's book; I Don't Want Your Job: Is Co-Managed IT Services the Right Fit For You?

RELATED ARTICLE: 3 Ways Co-Managed IT Services Can Help Your IT Department

What Is Co-Managed IT?

Co-managed IT is a strategic partnership that allows internal IT teams and managed service providers to seamlessly share an IT department's roles and responsibilities.

It is a true partnership designed to capitalize on the skills of your internal IT team while filling in the skills and functional expertise you are lacking. Because your team and the MSP partner cohesively, end-users get the same experience if the MSP or your internal team members solve the problem.

What Does Co-Managed IT Include?

All co-managed service providers structure their offerings a little differently. But in general, they can include any of the services offered in a fully managed services contract but only consists of the specific services or parts of services you need. It's essentially managed services a la carte.

An example of how you may choose to partner is help desk support. In a managed services relationship, your MSP serves as your help desk.

In a co-managed partnership, you determine if you want to outsource the entire help desk to the MSP, freeing you up to focus on projects and strategy, or you may choose to share help desk responsibilities.

Another example might be network monitoring. In a managed services relationship, your MSP installs the monitoring software, receives the monitoring alerts, and performs the world of investigating, troubleshooting, and resolving tickets generated from the alerts.

In a co-managed partnership, your MSP may provide the monitoring software and receive alerts. Then, they might assign alert tickets to your team to solve or triage, potentially sending the ticket back to the MSP help desk as they need additional support.

Most co-managed IT partnerships can include:

  • IT leadership consulting and management.
  • Network monitoring, management, and administration.
  • Help desk support (can function as a complete outsourced help desk, shared with your team).
  • On-site and remote IT support.
  • Lifecycle and asset management.
  • Network documentation.
  • Managed backups.
  • Disaster recovery and business continuity.
  • Cybersecurity consulting and solutions (managed firewalls, threat detection, endpoint detection and response, two-factor authentication, content filtering, security awareness, dark web monitoring, etc.)
  • Project management.
  • Project implementation.

Key Elements of a Successful Co-Managed IT Partnership

A successful co-managed partnership delivers an entirely consistent support experience to your end-users and organization. Your IT team and your MSP must work together as one cohesive unit. Otherwise, you'll be stuck with the same frustration you're currently experiencing when you have to spend time and resources feeding third-party vendors the information and access they need each time you need their support in troubleshooting an issue.

Five key elements must be in place to ensure a successful co-managed partnership.

Leadership Buy-In

First and foremost, leadership must be on board and bought into your co-managed partner. Leadership buy-in is vital before you even begin to put tools and processes in place.

Your MSP partner will potentially interact with all members of your organization. They will be involved, at some level, in driving organizational change and new technology adoption. Plus, they'll have similar access and insights into your network, your business, and your processes as an IT employee. So, leadership must have the same trust and faith in them as they do with your team.

Trust aside; there are bound to be some hiccups and hurdles to merge service delivery and support between you and your MSP partner. Leadership is key in driving harmony between your two teams and smoothing points of friction.

If your leaders aren't on board with this partnership, your team will not feel empowered to work effectively and transparently with your MSP partner.

Defined Responsibilities

By now, it should be clear that the most essential part of any co-managed partnership, after leadership buy-in, is clearly defined responsibilities. The specifics of the division of labor will vary from partnership to partnership. They will likely even change throughout the length of your relationship. But the need for defined roles, responsibilities, and accountability metrics is constant no matter how you define your partnership.

Shared Documentation

Documentation is key to delivering consistent service from a team of people. Good MSPs do this exceptionally well. Detailed documentation allows any tech on a team to pick up a ticket from one of hundreds of businesses and thousands of end-users and know what device they're calling about, its specs, support history, and any administrative passwords they need to troubleshoot the issue. Documentation is critical to ensure the quality and efficiency of support teams.

When you partner with an MSP, your team needs to share a secure, encrypted documentation system. Innovative uses IT Glue and gives your IT team the same read/write access to your company documentation as our techs. That way, we're all sharing the same information and work as a cohesive team.

Defined Process for Support Requests and Tickets

Support tickets are the core of any help desk. They track end-users' requests for support, ensure timely delivery of service, and provide the communication vehicle to escalate support from one tech to another.

If you choose to work together with an MSP for help desk services, shared ticketing in some capacity is essential to your successful co-managed relationship. If you don't share ticketing systems, a clearly defined process for who's doing what, in terms of incoming service requests, as well as how communication will flow between your two teams is essential.

This process for communication and support request flow holds your team and ours accountable to a standard service level agreement (SLA), including prompt response times and successful resolution.

Ticketing systems, shared with your MSP or not, allow you to:

  • Delegate requests to the tech (yours or ours) most qualified to solve the problem.
  • Identify users who need training, and free up your IT resources by filling training gaps that lead to support requests.
  • Make hiring and budget decisions based on data and not "gut feelings" or anecdotal evidence.

How Innovative Handles shared help desk

All Innovative clients have default access to create and view tickets within our support portal. You can also add co-managed ticketing to your services, giving your team and ours the ability to pass tickets back and forth between our teams. All techs (yours and ours) track their time, share status updates, and communicate within one ticketing portal with shared ticketing.

If your team is already using a ticketing platform, Innovative can work with you to evaluate the best way to share communication between your system and ours. There are always limitations when two teams work in different systems, but that may or may not impact the MSP's ability to deliver services depending on your needs and the specific systems involved.

Sometimes, depending on your ticketing system and the MSP's, you can create custom workflows to pass tickets between your system and theirs. This may limit real-time visibility but can still provide an uninterrupted support experience to your end-users.

Co-Managed Ticket Flow

If you do choose to share ticketing in some capacity, there are two different ways our team and yours can share ticket flow and assignments. Whatever way you choose, clearly defining the workflow is critical to the success of your partnership.

  1. All tickets come to your internal IT. Your team triages the request and assigns it to your team or ours based on the need.
  2. All tickets come to Innovative's help desk. Our team handles all tickets except those that meet your defined criteria for tickets you'd like assigned to your internal IT team (examples might include line of business applications or on-site needs at a specific location).

In addition to customizing the flow of tickets, co-managed partnerships require a clear definition of how the two teams will share ticketing assignments. This looks a little different for each partnership, depending on your internal capacity. However, it must be clearly defined to all stakeholders within both organizations.

Some companies want the MSP to handle low-level tickets while they work on tier three/network administrator types of support needs. Other companies want the MSP available for ticket escalation, vacation coverages, or overflow but work on day-to-day support tickets internally. Other criteria could include the location of on-site support needs, software vs. hardware support, etc. Some partnerships don't even need criteria and assign tickets in a round-robin format based on a pre-defined workload split between internal techs and MSPs.

Service Level Agreement

Lastly, your team and the MSP's team must be held accountable to a service level agreement. A service level agreement is a commitment to meeting identified service metrics.

Innovative's SLA includes a commitment to a minimum hold time, first response time, and issue resolution times.

Shared ticketing systems and standard accountability metrics between your team and the MSP's give you the tools to ensure everyone meets your service expectations.

Co-Managed IT Services Maximizes Your Team and End-User Experience

We're all just trying to maintain a secure and effective technology experience for end-users at the end of the day. Partnering with a managed service provider gives you the best of both worlds of internal IT departments and outsourced managed service providers. A co-managed partner offers a resource for things like day-to-day ticketing, backup support, consulting, budgeting, and project championing. An MSP is even great moral support, serving as that outside voice in your corner, helping you drive technology, security, and efficiency to non-technical leadership within your organization.

Managed IT Services