I don’t know if you’re like me, but I remember one of the worst feelings I had in school while growing up was sitting in an exam, staring blankly at a question and thinking to myself, “Boy, If only I could remember what I had read...” This used to diametrically different from the times when I would instantly remember the answer to an exam question! An effective memory, it turns out, is one of the best ways to create success. This is true in exams, in life, and it is true in business. Research by IDC, an analyst firm, on organizational memory have pegged the loss due to forgotten knowledge at about $32B per year for Fortune 500 companies. For small companies, studies have quantified the cost of lost knowledge at $2.4M per year.
So, how do you solve the lost knowledge problem and, depending on your company size, get back between $2.4M and $32B?
To answer this question, it helps to first find out the Why behind forgotten institutional knowledge, and then to ask what can be done to solve this underlying cause.
Here at Red Swift, our experience tells us that the answer to the Why question for MSPs is an unusual suspect - the ubiquitous use of spreadsheets to manage critical operations such as setting the project delivery schedule. This ubiquity of spreadsheets in business is not surprising. While they were initially designed to speed up numerical calculations such as found in accounting ledgers, the fact that spreadsheets are remarkably flexible, easy to use, and easy to send around via email or access collaboratively online, made them easy to adapt for a vast range of applications, including – as MSPs do in project scheduling – listing out project to resource assignments.
The problem is that spreadsheets were not designed to retain institutional memory. First, it is ridiculously easy for anyone with access to the spreadsheet to change a value in a particular cell or change a whole tab or even delete an entire workbook. Whatever was in the spreadsheet before is lost, and with it any institutional memory. Now you could argue that one way to solve this problem is to have the discipline that if a change is to be made then a new copy of the spreadsheet should be created and any new values recorded in the new copy. True enough, but spreadsheets were not designed to link information between spreadsheets. Each one is its own silo. So, if you see some value in one spreadsheet, knowing that it has changed from before will not be readily apparent, nor will the reason for the change. Consequently, while spreadsheets are absolutely fantastic in their flexibility and ease of use, they leak institutional knowledge like a sieve, costing you as an MSP lost revenue and profit in the process.
The answer to this problem is to have a solution MSPs can use to manage their critical operations that is as flexible, easy to use, and collaborative as spreadsheets, but one that retains institutional knowledge. Red Swift was designed exactly to be such a solution. Let us know if you’d like to learn more how we bring you all the benefits of spreadsheets for MSP operations management while also ensuring you retain institutional knowledge and all the benefits that provides.
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