Getting Started - Quick Overview

Getting Started - Quick Overview

General vCIO Process

Propel Your MSP's objective is to help vCIOs prepare better strategic "Technology Review" (aka QBR) meetings.
We generally recommend iterating through the following 4-step process:
  1. Identify infrastructure issues and any “not-up-to-standard" items by auditing your customer’s infrastructure and IT environment.
  2. Create an IT Project Roadmap that includes project recommendations to be discussed during your next meeting
  3. Prepare a detailed 3-to-5-year IT Budget, that includes Asset Lifecycle information
  4. Meet with your customer at a regular interval to present the results.

Each of these points are tackled by Propel Your MSP. 

Audit Module

The “Audit Module” allows you to audit your customers against your best standards and identity issues or gaps that need to be addressed. Each audit question is a simple “Pass / Fail / N/A” question with an associated severity. When auditing a customer's environment, the auditor answers each question and provides optional comments. Once all questions are answered, the auditor (who may be a different person than the vCIO) sends the audit for review by the vCIO who will address the identified issues.

When reviewing an issue, the vCIO can either:
  1. Have Propel create a Service Ticket in your PSA
  2. Create a Project Opportunity in Propel Your MSP to include it in your IT Project Roadmap and discuss it at your next meeting
  3. Link it to an existing Project Opportunity
  4. Use another remediation (built from a custom list)
Once all issues have been addressed, the vCIO would mark the Company Audit as "Finished". A Company Audit is a snapshot of your customer's infrastructure, so it is best practice to go over the whole process again after some time.

Account Templates

Audit Questionnaires are account-wide templates. You can have as many Audit Questionnaires as you want.
For each company, you can assign which Audit Questionnaires you want like to answer,
After a questionnaire has been assigned to a company, you can start a new Company Audit.
Note: When you start a company audit, the latest version of the account-wide template is used. All questions are copied over.

Budget Module

The "Budget Module" is where you build the IT Project Roadmap and the Asset Lifecycle. It's highly customizable to allow you to refine the IT budget the suit the nuances and particularities of each individual customer.

Asset Lifecycle

For a quick tour of the Asset Lifecycle, see this article.

IT Project Roadmap

The "Project Opportunities" tab allows you to create Project Opportunities along with their cost estimates, and also budget their impact on the Agreements (imported from your PSA or manually created). All those Projects will be used to generate an IT Project Roadmap.
When an expected start date is known, the Project will be present in chronological order, otherwise it will go into a list of Project Recommendations that should be discussed at the next QBR meeting.
Many Projects will replace existing Assets. Linking an Asset to a planned project will replace its standard End of Life and sync it to the expected start date of the Project.

vCIO Process Module

Helping you tie everything together and keep track of things is the responsibility of the vCIO Process where you define the different meeting schedule and audits that you wish to perform over the course of a year. A reminder of any upcoming item is sent either the vCIO or the Account Manager (or as a PSA Ticket) of a Company to make sure that nothing falls into the cracks.