Good, Better, Best - In Search of Greatness

Author: Craig Pollack Date: May 15, 2014 Topics: General Business Owner Blogs

in-search-of-greatnessA “Culture of Constant Improvement” - this is one of our internal mantras. To us this means we’re always looking for ways to improve ourselves individually as well as for FPA as a whole. We really believe this. 

One of the cool things about running a technology services company like ours is being around so many people who are constantly looking to learn and grow. Our environment is never stagnant. Our technical staff live, eat, and breath all the technology they can get their hands on. The foundation for this is in who we hire.

It’s also in our very own training process – FPAU. This is also one of the reasons why everyone has a training budget available to them and why our performance plans are such an important part of our ongoing development process. We learned a long time ago that we will live or die as a company by the quality of the service we deliver. And this all comes back to the quality of the staff we have. And the foundation for this is our chops – both technical as well as professional.

As a company, we’re also always looking at ways to improve things – whether it’s a process, a system, or our organizational structure. Naturally, we can’t do this in a bubble based only on our own perception of things. What we as the leaders of the company think is certainly helpful, but we really can’t hit home runs when it comes to change without input from our clients.

To this end, we recently embarked on a program where we’ve reached out to our clients and gotten real and meaningful feedback on how we’re doing. Over the past few months, our Manager of Remote Support has had a “sit down” with a large percentage of our clients and brought the results back to us.

Based on this feedback, we’re now in the process of making some changes that we believe will lead to real and meaningful improvements that all of our clients should start noticing. First off, we brought in a Manager of Remote Support to manage the help desk ticket queue. He is specifically tasked with improving the response time as well as the resolution time of help desk requests. We’re also increasing the size of our Client Teams (these are the teams dedicated to supporting specific clients).

While we’re hiring as fast as we can to add additional resources, we’re also promoting from within. We’ve moved a few of our Remote Support and NOC staff onto Client Teams. Our belief is this will allow them to know more about their clients’ systems since they’ll be able to focus more on just their Team’s specific clients. This will also improve the response and resolution times. In addition, this will improve the quality of the ongoing tasks (such as new user setups, software installs, etc.).

We’ve proactively promoted some of our more senior staff to take more of a leadership role on the teams involving them in the development of the less experienced team members. We’re also hiring like crazy! We have at least 3 to 4 open positions we’re currently looking to fill. We believe that all of these changes taken together will have a significant impact and improve the services that FPA delivers to its clients. 

While we’ve already completed some of these changes, we’re still in the process of making them all.  That said, we’re already seeing improved results. So from where I sit, these are some exciting times for FPA.  As a client, please let me know what you see. If you’re not a client, please feel free to let me know what pains you're experiencing from your current IT Service Provider. I’d love to hear how we compare.

Over time, going from good, to better, to best has always been our goal. With our recent changes, we’re excited to continue our drive towards greatness…

Author

Craig Pollack

Craig Pollack

Craig is the Founder & CEO of FPA Technology Services, Inc. Craig provides the strategy and direction for FPA, ensuring its clients, business owners, and key decision makers leverage technology as efficiently and effectively as possible. With over 30 years of experience building the preeminent IT Service Provider in the Southern California area, Craig is one of the area’s leading authorities on how small to mid-sized businesses can best leverage and secure their technology to achieve their business objectives.

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