Rewarding the quiet
In managed services, a flat ticket graph can leave a finance director wondering what they're paying for. Service reviews should make prevention visible.
Insights and thoughts Andrew Wood
Moving from tickets to outcomes runs into an awkward commercial paradox in managed services.
In public health, they call it the prevention paradox: when preventative measures actually work, nothing bad happens, which immediately convinces the people holding the budget that the risk was exaggerated in the first place. Anyone who remembers the months after the Y2K rollover, when thousands of hours of quiet remediation meant the clocks ticked over smoothly only for commentators to claim the whole thing was a hoax, has seen this play out in IT.
We recreate that exact trap in managed services every quarter. A fast response SLA often just celebrates how quickly an MSP puts out a fire that shouldn’t have started. When monitoring thresholds are tuned properly and automated remediation scripts quietly fix faults in the background, the result is silence. Yet in a quarterly service review, walking in with a flat ticket graph can leave a client’s finance director wondering what they’re actually paying for.
A chaotic month full of major incidents and heroic weekend engineering looks like high-value activity. A quiet one looks like nothing happened, even when building the automation and patch pipelines to achieve that silence took far more skill and effort.
Fixing that means changing what gets reported. If you only report on human ticket activity, you penalise your own engineering efficiency. Good service reviews make the preventative work visible: the perimeter exposure patched within hours of an advisory, the storage volume that expanded automatically at 3am before a database locked up, or the capacity bottleneck caught a month before peak trading.
The incentives have to flip. As long as service reviews celebrate firefighting over fireproofing, silence will keep being mistaken for inactivity, and outcomes will stay on the slide deck.