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Eric Dosal

Choosing the Right KPIs for Your Organization

Organizations that are looking to make and execute better decisions will benefit from using key performance indicators (KPIs) to determine how they are performing in relation to their goals and ...
Organizations that are looking to make and execute better decisions will benefit from using key performance indicators (KPIs) to determine how they are performing in relation to their goals and objectives. However, to do it successfully you must learn how to choose the right ones for your organization. Purpose of Key Performance Indicators Key performance indicators allow organizations to improve the performance of the organization as well as the individuals within the organization. Specifically, they allow you to: Increase productivity. You don’t want people doing busy work or focused on the wrong things. Establishing KPIs allows you to determine whether your team is working toward the right goals and what adjustments need to occur to keep productivity high. Improve performance. KPI metrics provide a measuring tool for determining if employees are performing at the level expected for their role within the organization, while assisting the company reach its strategic objectives. Make better decisions. Choosing the appropriate actions to take depends on the goals you want to reach. KPIs help reduce uncertainty by providing a basis for determining which decisions will lead you in the right direction. KPIs are a useful tool for creating a high-performing culture. They allow you to balance quantitative and qualitative measures to understand desired performance. Choosing KPIs for Your Business Choosing the best KPIs for your business requires you to understand the basic concept behind their development. First, for it to be a key indicator it must be critical and relevant to the organization’s success. As this Industry Week article suggests, KPIs should measure performance toward the strategic objectives that you’ve laid out as part of your operations strategic plan. It is absolutely critical that these KPIs measure the most important factors in achieving your success. Stay away from the minutia. Next, KPIs must be quantifiable, controllable, and repeatable. If team members cannot influence the outcome, you’ll find it difficult to gain their buy-in. Selected KPIs might include improved customer service response rate, increased revenue from the sales team, or a decrease in past due receivables. Finally, a key indicator means the outcome or expectations are measurable. KPIs are a gauge. They should have a specific expected outcome that you can track over time. When it comes to choosing the right KPIs for your organization, consider your main purpose is to determine how to drive business performance. For more information on key performance indicators, business intelligence, and related topics, review our website, read our blog, and follow us on Twitter. To learn more about what KPIs you should be using to manage your Service Team better please check out our webinar Establishing & Managing Your Key Performance Indicators for MSPs.
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Establishing & Managing Key Performance Indicators for MSPs

This is one webinar you won’t want to miss! We just wrapped up one of our most successful webinars on the topic of Establishing & Managing Your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), specifically geared towards Managed Services & IT Services Providers. This was the 2nd installment of the BrightGauge Educational Webinar Series which kicked off with a session on How To Increase Efficiency & Profitability Through Service Management Excellence. During this 50 minute session, Veteran MSP Operations Coach Rex Frank of Sea-Level Operations guided us through the key metrics every MSP & IT Service Provider owner and/or Executive should be monitoring and managing. He shared several best practices on each metric and real life examples that you can immediately implement in your company. The webinar is broken up into sections to make it easy for you to share the necessary portions with the appropriate team members. The key sections include: Leading vs. Lagging Indicators Indicators vs. Key Indicators Sales KPIs Finance KPIs P&L Based KPI's Service KPIs To download visit: http://info.brightgauge.com/establishing-managing-kpis

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MSP Customer Case Study: Community IT

Johanny Torrico is the main BrightGauge admin within the fast growing Community IT Innovators based in Washington D.C. As the Director of Network Support Services at Community IT she wears many hats and is constantly looking for ways to bring efficiency into her day to day work routine. Below Johanny shares a real life case study of how she and her team get the most value from BrightGauge. ================== Since data is stored in a variety of places and many different applications are used to perform essential business functions, identifying and defining the metrics which are important and relevant to informing performance, allocating resources, and maintaining operational efficiency is both crucial and challenging. A few years ago, Community IT's leadership team established a set of team and company Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Pulling the data was tedious and time consuming. Managers had to run canned reports from our Professional Services Automation System (PSA) or create complicated pivot tables from CSV exports or direct SQL connections. In addition to being time consuming, we found the end result was often inaccurate and incorrect. Community IT started to explore other reporting tools, which better integrated with our PSA system and tested them. BrightGauge, which had recently matured its services, had also added a dashboard and a number of different gauges to its product. We decided to pilot the BrightGauge system, and ultimately partner with them as our reporting system. BrightGauge has simplified our job in many ways, and here are the top four: Help Desk Performance Monitoring: Live and real time information about our help desk's performance is critical to delivering quality services to our clients. Basic indicators, including response and resolution time of both the team and the technicians, identifying aging tickets, and easily accounting for the number of tickets submitted after hours, were all tasks that required a manager to do a lot of manual work. Hardware Inventory: This was another task that required manual intervention and, on many occasions, a physical site visit. BrightGauge, along with our monitoring system, allowed us to automate the creation of the report and saved us from making expensive and time consuming site visits. Proactive Services: The BrightGauge platform gives us an opportunity to proactively notify our clients when their warranties are about to expire. Client Services: As part of our Managed Service offering, we meet with most of our clients regularly. Preparing for these meetings required us to run a number of different reports, focusing on tickets, system alerts, and budgets, all of which could take between two and three hours to execute. Now, by using BrightGauge, these reports are pre-set, and are automatically delivered to the team and the client. Now, instead of spending valuable resources generating reports, the client and the manager can spend their time focusing on the results. Developing the right set of KPI's is important, but it's only half of the equation. To fully understand and leverage the information your KPIs provide, you need a tool that delivers accurate and consistent information. BrightGauge has allowed us to continue to monitor our current KPI's and develop additional metrics for both teams and individuals. The implementation of the BrightGauge platform has allowed us to utilize our resources more effectively and efficiently, which leads to lower costs and improved services for our clients. To learn what others are saying about BrightGauge visit the BrightGauge Buzz page and below is a screenshot of a set of Johanny's dashboards she keeps at her desk.

Free Webinar: Establishing & Managing Your Key Performance Indicators for MSPs

Earlier this year, we kicked off the 2014 BrightGauge Educational Webinar Series with a session on How To Increase Efficiency & Profitability Through Service Management Excellence. During the session, MSP Operations Coach Rex Frank of Sea-Level Operations guided us through his 10 Step Operations Plan. This plan outlines the 10 steps that every Service Manager and organization should follow to increase efficiency and profitability. After the webinar, we polled the participants to determine which of the 10 steps they wanted to learn more about, and after several hundred votes were cast, the clear winner was Establishing & Managing MSP Key Performance Indicators. So, we're bringing Rex back for another round, and will be taking a deep dive into the topic. We guarantee you'll learn best practices and strategies that you can immediately implement to make your operations plan run more efficiently. During the session, Rex will cover topics like: Leading vs. Lagging Indicators Indicators vs. Key Indicators Sales KPIs Finance KPIs Service KPIs P&L Based KPI's As usual, we want to accommodate our global community, so we will be hosting the same call twice, on June 18th. Please RSVP to the one session that best fits your schedule by clicking the date/time link: June 18th at 10:30am or June 18th at 7:30pm (both EDT)

Kaseya Connect 2014 Conference Summary

The BrightGauge team attended the Kaseya Connect Conference in Las Vegas, and we had a phenomenal time. We attend these conferences for three main reasons: To educate our team on current market and industry trends. Meet with customers who are attending the event. Connect with prospects who have shown an interest in our product. The conference did not disappoint, and we had many great opportunities to meet with clients and potential customers. We also got valuable insight into the future of our industry and the opportunity to hear specifically about the direction of one of our key integration partners. Here are four important takeaways: Kaseya is committing to the Cloud. This interesting announcement was met with some pushback. This is a big change, and not everyone is comfortable with moving to the cloud. At BrightGauge, we are excited to hear that a large MSP player is considering a 100% move to the cloud. I predict that there will be some continued resistance to the move from Kaseya On Premise Partners who enjoy the flexibility of having their system on the premise. We can expect additional integrations. Most of the new Kaseya Management Team comes from Computer Associates and SalesForce.com, both of which have well integrated software platforms. The management team hinted that not only are more integrations are on the way, but these integrations will be tighter, making everything more seamless. Everyone is bullish on the MSP Industry. As we walked around the conference, we couldn't help but notice the positive energy around us. There were many conversations about industry growth and client acquisitions. Given that our target audience is MSPs and IT Service Providers, it was comforting and encouraging to hear positive feedback and witness the momentum they are experiencing. Dashboard and Reporting is a top priority. One of the largest and best attended breakout session was on Dashboard and Reporting. Most participants are asking for more access and customization capabilities with their data. Currently, many companies utilize a third party tool, like BrightGauge's technology, to streamline and manage their reporting. We left with some great ideas for our new Kaseya Management Dashboards (see the image below), which we have already made available to our partners. We really enjoyed the three days of learning with and from some of our industry's experts and thought leaders. The best part of the trip, however, was the Customer Happy Hour we hosted. It's always great to connect and chat, in person, with folks from our community. At BrightGauge, we know that nurturing these connections and relationships are as, if not more important, than attending any breakout session. To learn how you can leverage BrightGauge's custom reporting and dashboards with your Kaseya platform please visit: http://www.brightgauge.com/kaseya/

70+ Metrics for MSPs

Key metrics and accompanying formulas to help MSPs skyrocket growth and success!

Get your KPIs

[MUST SEE] Webinar on Service Operations Management Excellence

If you did not attend our Service Excellence Webinar, you missed a FANTASTIC webinar! Fortunately the recording and slide deck are now available to download by clicking the links at the bottom of this post. Here's a brief summary of the webinar: If you’re in the IT Services business and especially if you’re responsible for Service Options or Service Delivery, this webinar is a MUST WATCH. The webinar has received a 9.4 out of 10 overall rating from your peers. We are so excited with how our first BrightGauge Educational Webinar of 2014 went with MSP Operations Coach Rex Frank of Sea-Level Operations. Rex boiled down his 25+ years of experience of building Service Teams and most recently consulting with Service Managers into a simple and practical 10-Step Operations Plan that every Service Manager and organization should follow. Over the 65 minute session Rex shares real life examples that tied into many best practices take aways that you can implement immediately. During this session he discussed topics like: Getting Your PSA Configured Correctly Getting Your Policies and Procedures Documented Establishing Measurable KPIs How to Leverage Your Tools Getting Your Accounting System In Order Focusing on Growth Leveraging Marketing Developing Your Sales Strategy To download visit: http://info.brightgauge.com/service-management-excellence

Getting Our Customers Implemented

At BrightGauge, because we are a SaaS product and have no contracts we have to drive value for our customers every day or they can just cancel. We purposely structured our plans and pricing this way because this is how we would want software to be sold to us. There are lots of reasons besides “not enough value” that people will leave our platform, like the customer getting acquired or migrating to a data source that doesn’t integrate etc. When our team reviewed the reasons for several of our recent cancellations, we found a large portion were because they never got "implemented". Our definition of being implemented is that you have set up BrightGauge, the data is flowing, hopefully you have set up a few dashboards, a few reports and built some custom gauges. Once that has been completed and you get the metrics you want, we consider you officially “Implemented”. For legacy software vendors where you pay for the software upfront and just have a small maintenance after the fact, they don’t necessarily care if you implemented the software. Large enterprise companies have built billion dollar business selling software that never gets implemented. We call that “shelf-ware” instead of “software”. So at BrightGauge this year we implemented a more formal customer implementation review process. Each month we block off 90 minutes and 4 of us sit in a conference room (check out the picture below) and review each of the prior month’s sign ups. We divide up the different applications we use to support our customers (Salesforce, ZenDesk, HubSpot, and our internal Admin tool) and each person logs into one application to provide an update. Brian Dosal, Larry Garcia, & Steve Restrepo I know it sounds a bit manual but given the size of our customer base and the intimate knowledge we have of our customers it works for us. Our plan is once we get a good understanding of the data points we can automate it with Intercom. After our first meeting we all agreed it was a lot of fun and a great exercise to sync up on how our customers are doing.

[Webinar] Service Management Excellence with MSP Coach Rex Frank

We are very excited to kick off 2014 with our first BrightGauge Educational Webinar Series with MSP Operations Coach Rex Frank of Sea Level Operations. After surveying our 1000+ users we discovered the biggest area they wanted to improve on is making their service team more efficient. As a matter of fact, when asked which area of their MSP practice was the most important to improve “Service Delivery and/or Operations” ranked as #1 by far with an average score of 4.3 out of 5.0. After reviewing the survey results we went to work finding resources that can help educate our community. Rex and his company popped up on our radar several times during our research and it wasn’t until I had the opportunity to work a peer group with Rex last November that I really saw the value in his expertise. So we asked him to put together a presentation that we can share with the BrightGauge community. During this exclusive 1 hour webinar Rex will share practical tips as part of his “10-Step Operations Plan” that you can walk away with and implement immediately to increase your Efficiency and Profitability. You will learn best practices from Rex’s vast experience working with MSPs to improve their service operations, including topics like: Getting Your PSA Configured Correctly Getting Your Policies and Procedures Documented Establishing Measurable KPIs How to Leverage Your Tools Getting Your Accounting System In Order Focusing on Growth Leveraging Marketing Developing Your Sales Strategy We will be hosting the same call twice on March 11th to accommodate our global community so please be sure to only RSVP to one by clicking the link of the time that works best for you. March 11th at 10:30am or March 11th at 7:30pm (both EST)

Autotask Dashboards available by BrightGauge

Today BrightGauge officially launches our Dashboard solution for the Autotask community. It takes just minutes to deploy and all of your key Autotask metrics can be at your fingertips and refreshed every 15 min helping you and your team make BETTER decisions FASTER with the most up to date data. Let us show you how you can use data to improve your service operations by monitoring key metrics like: The BrightGauge Dashboards allow your team to collaborate on what’s going on “right now” instead of waiting for information to update tomorrow. In fact, due to this real time nature of KPI monitoring, our Autotask partners have already seen improvements in customer satisfaction and client service by displaying the metrics to their teams. Here are two teammates from Mirus IT collaborating over a few of the metrics: To learn about how you can leverage our dashboard solution for Autotask please reach out to our team by visiting: Autotask Integration Team But don’t take our word for it, check out how Paul Tomlinson of Mirus IT Solutions in the UK, uses our dashboards to increase his customer service in his latest blog post: BrightGauge Dashboards

New Process For Importing Data on a Per Client (or Company) Basis

The most frequently asked question by our prospects when evaluating our software is why we are priced “Client based”. For our current partners, many times they say some “data is missing” because they haven’t imported that specific company into BrightGauge. There are two main reasons we currently ask our partners to choose clients to import. By breaking up the Data Ingestion by Client, it limits the amount data transferred “over the wire” since we send client at a time. Since BrightGauge started as a Client Facing Reporting tool back in late 2011 many customers use our tool to create reports for key clients of theirs. Thus only working with those client’s data makes sense for that use case (a legacy use case). For both prospects and current customers, this process causes confusion and we are working to make this easier. For our ConnectWise partners, this has been an extra source of confusion because we added a filter on which clients were available to import. And that filter was based on what type of Active Agreements clients were associated with. As more people used our dashboard functionality they not only wanted to import “agreement based” clients but prospects, project and break/fix clients as well. Today we are happy to share that we removed this agreement filter and instead ask that our Connectwise partners filter which clients/companies are available to import based on COMPANY TYPE!! Screenshot of Client Import Screen We’re ultra aware of our customers experience in using BrightGauge and when there is a source of confusion, we attack it. Today was just a stepping stone in making the Data Ingestion model less client focused and more data source focused. The good news is that as part of our BrightGauge 4.0 release, due out later this year, this data importing will be completely overhauled and transparent to our customers. In the mean time, if you have any questions or concerns related to the client import process, don’t hesitate to reach out to our support team.

Meet the 2014 BrightGauge Team

As we kick off 2014 we wanted to introduce the BrightGauge Team to our community of customers, partners, friends and family. Over the next few months we’ll share more info about each of them but in the mean time, here's a little summary of each of us. The BrightGauge Team: Steve, David, Larry, Eric, Brian, Orlando, and Christian Steve works with our customers focusing his efforts mainly on support with a secondary responsibility of consulting engagements. His main goal is to make sure that all of the support requests we receive get addressed as quickly and thoroughly as possible. If you submit a question to our team you will most likely meet Steve! David is responsible for the front end of our software application, which means all the screens you interact with are his responsibility. So when you click a button and it takes you to another page, or runs a job, that’s all David’s work. Larry works with all of our prospective customers as they are evaluating our software. Larry isn’t your typical “sales guy” that you only work with before signing up. Since his background is in the education space he likes to work with our customers after they sign up to make sure they are getting the most out of the product. Eric is one of our two co-founders (along with his brother Brian) and he is responsible for all of our sales, marketing, educating our customers, communicating with our customers as well as some boring finance stuff like following up on expiring credit cards. Eric was the lead of our former MSP and we tap his experience to help our customers with the data and metrics they should be monitoring. Brian is our other co-founder and the one responsible for originally coming up with the idea of BrightGauge. He plays a variety of roles but primarily he’s the Product Manager helping manage the development team along with helping customers with any custom work required. His passion for BrightGauge is evident when you speak with him and he loves hearing feedback so feel free to share. Orlando is one of our lead developers and knows the backend of the application better than anyone. He handles our bi-weekly releases and doubles as 2nd and 3rd level support if there is a major issue. When he’s not supporting the code base, he helps architect new projects and features as well as implements them. Christian is our lead architect which means he’s working with Orlando on any high level issues that might pop up but he spends most of his time working on new projects that we have on the roadmap. Christian has experience with Big Data projects and products and is helping us prepare our infrastructure to scale as we grow. We are a tight group of 7 that work very hard on making sure our customers have the best possible experience.

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