One of the fellow readers asked how come everyone was stuck in this talk about the process, documentation, checklists and nobody seemed to talk tools anymore (“No posts on SBS? Nothing to say about Shockey Monkey?” / actual quote). Now I should point out that this person likely reads a very select set of blogs… and as usual and as the name implies, Vladville is my world view. So yeah, Karl and I are talking process.
Now that all the disclaimers are out of the way I can come clean….
Since the original posts in June of 2008, our hosting business has grown in the four figure percent range.
As you may imagine, the usual business response to this type of success is to add more monkeys to the bucket. Microsoft’s perpetual failure in managing the channel is pretty much the encyclopedia of how that’s done.
As the business grows and as the offering scales, the user experience is all over the map. You have great experiences. You have horrible interactions. So long as you get 90% of positive responses, you’re gold, right?
Not quite.
This is where the process documentation, development and design come to play. It creates a repeatable experience, protocol and makes company and business problem troubleshooting very similar to debugging and troubleshooting computer systems.
So, much like for most of you, my “new server” business has gone into the toilet. Projects in the SMB land are spotty. But the hosting business is explosive, managed services (w/o committment / contract) is skyrocketing and storage business is about to be set on fire.
We’re automating everything. Not just to reduce the overhead operational costs but to deliver a consistent experience.
For the past two years that I’ve been writing SM, I’ve woken up with only one thing on my mind:
How do I make this s*** someone elses problem.
It turns out it’s quite simple: cloning. In void of that, it’s all about documentation and process management.
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