MSP Discovery Checklist
BY IT GLUE | February 05, 2021
Today’s IT environments are complex. On top of that, large portions of employees now work remotely due to the pandemic and may even be using their personal devices to do so. With so many variables to consider, documenting the ins and outs of a client’s IT environment during the sales or onboarding process becomes challenging. However, this is where an MSP discovery checklist comes in handy.
An MSP discovery checklist keeps you organized. It makes sure you don’t miss out on any critical information regarding your clients’ IT environments. More importantly, it saves you and your techs from last-minute scrambles.
For an MSP discovery checklist to be effective, it must:
Offer Insight Into Threat History
Threat history gives you a glimpse into your clients’ mentality toward cybersecurity. Ensure the checklist features questions that reveal the cause, nature and impact of past data breaches, phishing and ransomware attacks, and the corrective actions that were taken.
Identify Security Vulnerabilities
Besides past data, the checklist must also feature questions that expose the security vulnerabilities in a client’s IT environment. It should cover everything from endpoint security, firewall placements and third-party patching to end-user training programs.
Document All Critical Information
The checklist must act as a guide to your technicians and help them document everything that you want documented, right from hardware device information, user data, access privileges, software type, license expiry dates, compliance standards that need to be met, risk levels associated with the software and more. It must also gather information on remote workers such as workstation details, network devices, internet providers, schedule and shift timings, and access privileges.
Gauge the Client’s Knowledge of IT
Each client’s approach towards IT will vary. You can gauge their seriousness by finding out if they have invested in backup and disaster recovery solutions, whether they have a business continuity plan in place, what kind of password policy they have, whether they conduct IT training programs for their employees, what sort of access control measures they have, etc. Use your discovery checklist to get answers to all these questions and determine if their perception about the importance of IT aligns with the objective truth of the matter.
Help Determine the Priority Level
Each client has different needs and priorities. Some may have a rather complicated IT environment while others may not, which is why you cannot broadly apply the same onboarding process to everyone. You need to determine the resources and the level of attention required to onboard each client. Ideally, your MSP discovery checklist must help you determine the level of help desk assistance and tech support needed by each client.
Wrapping Up
Now that you know what constitutes an effective MSP discovery checklist, it’s time to create one for yourself. It is definitely worth the effort, especially since this checklist comes in handy everywhere — sales, project management, onboarding and quoting/billing.
With IT Glue, you can connect your documentation to your MSP discovery checklist and automate the implementation process. IT Glue imports information from PSA, RMM and other tools and then uses contextualized documentation to create links — users connected to endpoints and connected to infrastructure — to streamline your team’s work.
Request a quick demo to see it in action!
