After many years of brainstorming and collecting input for consideration, I'm finally ready to get the MSP Pro Academy launched. The intention is to build a learning and collaboration portal where anyone interested in training in the Information Technology Service Management (ITSM) discipline can fi...

If you've ever had the strange feeling that the efforts your team is working for are not fully supported by everyone on the team or even management, it's probably not unwarranted. All too often we have meetings where we discuss the path to success and then look around the room asking for buy-in, but...

Do you remember when your business consisted of nothing more than you and your dog? Maybe even your spouse was involved. And then one day, it doubled in size because you hired your first real employee. How did you manage that person? Most likely, you tried to give them autonomy in how they operated ...

When I was young, if I wanted to talk to my best friend Randy without going over to his house or meeting him somewhere, I had only one choice - call him on the telephone. Of course, I could only call him if he had previously given me his phone number or if I knew the last name used for setting up th...

A few years back, I wrote an article on ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) and I even interviewed an expert on the subject. ITIL has always been thought of as the best practice library for big corporations, but it is folks like myself who are trying to pull that curtain down all th...

I’ve been meaning to blog about this thing I call the Pyramid of Purpose and Value™ for the longest time. Well, I ended up writing about it extensively in my book Getting To The Next Level, so I’m taking advantage of that and posting the introduction to the Pyramid directly from Chapter 1, What Does...

By my definition, it is the most valuable intangible asset of any organization. The Human Element is the actuator, custodian, and perpetuator of the organization’s culture. It is the single most powerful determinant of success for a healthy and viable business. Only with a healthy company culture ca...

Have you ever wanted to put on a small event to showcase or show off your product or services but just don't have the budget? Then you should know about what is called the Marketing Development Fund or MDF for short. It is the term used for funds available from vendors and partners of products and s...

Are you running a help desk, service desk or a call center? And do you know the difference? I find it odd that so many small companies try to run some version of a help desk as if they had infinite technical resources like a call center. They say, “We want a real person to answer the phone when the ...

You have to learn how to filter your world to stop the interrupts and in today’s business world that means everything from your phone, the people around you when you’re in an office, to the content that's stuffed into your face as you do your job. And now in the 21st century, it’s not just somebody ...

Having worked with so many service companies over the years I've seen and felt the pains of the roller coaster that is the tech workforce. The smaller your company is the more you feel it when someone even gets sick let alone has to part ways with the company. I say you should always know who the ne...

One of my measures of the maturity of a service team is their ability to have a weekly stand-up meeting every Monday morning. Rain or shine, good or bad, fire and flames or all quit. By the way, I actually prefer the term Scrum as it is an Agile term and it really is more appropriate for how I think...