This article is part of day 12 of the KINTO Technologies Advent Calendar 2024

Introduction

Hello everyone! My name is Matsuno, and I am a member of the Platform Group MSP team at KINTO Technologies (my entry from when I first joined can be found here). In my previous job, I worked for an SES operating company and was in charge of maintenance and operation of systems built on-premise and AWS as an infrastructure engineer. Just as I thought that I wanted to be a little more involved with the system and the people involved with it, I joined KINTO Technologies by chance, and now I am.

The reason why I decided to write this article

What do you think of when you suddenly hear the MSP? Do you know what it stands for?
Embarrassingly, I didn't know the acronym MSP until the recruiter showed me the job posting....
So, in this article, I would like to share what I learned and struggled with since joining KINTO Technologies as a member of the MSP team, as well as what the MSP team is doing!

What is MSP?

First, let me give you a general description of MSP. MSP stands for "Managed Service Provider" and is introduced in the Gartner Glossary as follows: (Translated by DeepL)

Managed Service Providers (MSPs) provide services such as network, application, infrastructure, and security through ongoing, regular support and active management at a customer location, an MSP data center (hosted), or a third-party data center.  
MSPs may also offer their own services in combination with the services of other providers (for example, Security MSPs provide systems management on top of third-party cloud IaaS). Pure Play MSPs specialize in a single vendor or technology and typically provide their core services. Many MSPs include services from other types of providers.  
The term MSP used to be applied to infrastructure- and device-centric types of services, but now it includes ongoing routine management, maintenance, and support.
Gartner Glossary: Quoted from Managed Service Provider (MSP)

"Provide through ongoing, regular support and active management." This is the core idea of MSP.
If you look up the term MSP, it seems that there are some differences between businesses, but most of them refer to services that specialize in the maintenance, operation, and monitoring of running systems.

MSP team efforts at KINTO Technologies

The origins of the MSP team

From here on, let’s take a look at what the MSP team is doing within KINTO Technologies!
First, the mission of the MSP team at KINTO Technologies.

“We will contribute to indirect development speed and quality improvement through application operation support.”

In order to understand why this mission came about, I looked back at the time when the MSP team was established.
When the concept of the MSP team was first launched, KINTO Technologies faced the following challenges.

1. Since the developer and operator of the system under development are the same, the development speed cannot be increased due to the busy operation work.
2. We are not able to provide support at the same time as the system uptime in response to problems.

In order to solve these issues, the MSP team at KINTO Technologies is composed of the following two teams:

• MSP Service Desk (Outsourced)
• MSP In-house Team

The MSP Service Desk is outsourced and will be a so-called 24h365d capable unit.
On the other hand, the MSP in-house team is a relatively new team that was launched in May 2023 and handles the work taken over from each development team within KINTO Technologies during the day on weekdays.

Specific responsibilities of the MSP team

At KINTO Technologies, various in-house products are being developed every day, and the MSP team mainly handles the following tasks.

• Account management
  • Account registration and deletion
  • Password resets
  • Account inventory
  • Turnover response
• Compile and disseminate security reports
• Support for reruns when data integration batch fails
• System monitoring alert primary response
• Response to various inquiries

Some of you may be able to imagine from the list above, but the current MSP team mainly deals with systems management and operation that can be handled regularly, those that need to be handled by multiple teams but the response method was not unified, or those that could not be handled.

What are we actually doing?

Since it might be hard to picture, I’m going to introduce some details of the work that the MSP team is working on.
Currently, the MSP team responds to turnover based on HR information published internally every month.
The task involves gathering information on employees who are leaving their jobs due to retirement or childcare leave. This includes managing all processes from confirming the existence of accounts on target systems (both in-house and SaaS) to deleting those accounts. As of November 2024, a total of seven systems developed and managed by two groups are responding to turnover.
The benefits of having the MSP team handle this task all at once include the following for example.

• Business standardization
  • Eliminate account management differences between groups and systems.
• Reduce operating costs and focus on development
  • Reduce operational costs for the team responsible for system development and management.
• Prevention of work becoming dependent on an individual employee
  • The MSP in-house team creates procedures to ensure that all team members are available.

In terms of operational cost reduction, let’s make a specific calculation for the turnover response in the following example.
For seven systems, let’s say that the person in charge handles the removal of turnover accounts on a monthly basis. And assume that each task takes about two hours.
In that case, the monthly and annual operating costs required overall will be:

2 (monthly workloads) x 7 (number of target systems) = 14 (hours/month)
14 (hours/month) x 12 = 168 (hours/year)

This is just an estimate, but it shows that the MSP team handles approximately 150 workloads a year, taking on responsibilities that would otherwise fall to the development team.
When I joined KINTO Technologies, the MSP team was already handling employee turnover. Even mid-month, accounts were deleted the next working day after an employee left, which gave me the impression that the team was responding quite efficiently.

While there are these advantages, there are also disadvantages of course.
You might think of the following:

• High communication costs
  • Depending on the work, there is an increase in interactions with the team that took over, so it can be difficult to feel the benefits of letting go of the work.
• Handover risk
  • Due to operational errors by the MSP team, recovery measures are required.

Based on these advantages and disadvantages, **how to minimize the disadvantages and increase the advantages at the time of taking over work is the time to show of your skills. **

So far, I have introduced the formation of the MSP team at KINTO Technologies and its specific operations.
I wrote some cool things, but I'm still inexperienced, so I'm studying every day.

The future of the MSP team

What was requested

I would like to close this article by talking about what I have been asked to do since joining KINTO Technologies, and about the future of the MSP team!
First of all, when I joined KINTO Technologies, I was asked to do the following two things.

1. To grow as an MSP in-house team leader and lead the in-house team
2. To contribute to the expansion of the MSP in-house production team by utilizing my practical experience of system maintenance and operation.

These were very challenging for me. This is because the work style up until now was that certain sets of tasks in each time span, such as daily, weekly, and monthly, were required to be output with the same quality without making mistakes. Most of the time, both as an organization and as a system, things were stable.
On the other hand, KINTO Technologies is an organization that aims to expand both as an organization and as a business, and of course, the development of new systems is progressing accordingly. As an MSP team whose mission is to improve the speed and quality of development of the development team, we would like to expand our response operations.

What I was conscious of as a team leader

As I mentioned earlier, I thought I understood what I was asked to do, but it was completely different from doing the work in front of me as an engineer and being a team leader. Up until now, I only had to focus on my own output. However, to grow as a team leader, I need to pay attention to the output of all my team members.
Up until now, I only had to focus on my own output. However, to grow as a team leader, I need to pay attention to the output of all my team members.
I have gotten used to it with the support of those around me, but I feel that I am learning every day.

Expanding the capabilities of the MSP in-house team

Lastly, I will contribute to the business expansion of the MSP in-house team by utilizing my practical experience in system maintenance and operation.
In the past, I was at a development site that was shrinking as an organization, but the work was becoming more dependent on individual employees. I remember feeling that it was quite difficult to get rid of that dependency, partly because of the aging of the people in charge and the ongoing overload situation. I thought I could do what I could, but there was a limit to what I could do because the workloads were also limited.
Based on that experience, I feel that what the MSP team is working on now is useful for KINTO Technologies.
I understand what the team is trying to do and the need for it very well, but I don't have the know-how.

In order to expand the efforts of the MSP team, I believe that I need to be able to do and practice the following.

• Think not only from a system perspective but also from a business perspective in order to create an appropriate business design and flow.
• When taking over work, follow the steps to ensure that the output of the MSP team is consistent.
• Get to know the MSP team’s efforts within KINTO Technologies.

Inherently, I don’t dislike creating documents such as procedure manuals, and I don’t have any opposition to doing routine work, so I am confident that this is appropriate to a certain extent, but I feel that the part of creating work is really difficult.... Up until now, I have been working in a system development-oriented way, so I naturally focus on system specifications and the AWS services we use internally. However, to build a successful business, I need to shift my focus beyond just system specifications and AWS services. “What is our business perspective?” Every day, I face documents while asking myself this question.

From the perspective of aligning the output, I understand that the basic procedure is to prepare the workflow, raise a ticket, gather the necessary information, and respond to it. However, we are struggling to organize our business flow. It is difficult to judge which part should be considered properly and which part should not be considered much.

I think that if you can practice the above after establishing your own style, you can minimize the risk of business handover and maximize the advantages, but this is quite difficult.... I feel that this is something that cannot be acquired overnight, so I am working on my day-to-day work with the help of my superiors and managers. However, if I can create good work through my work, it will lead to the expansion of the MSP team, so I will do my best.

Conclusion

In this article, I began by discussing MSP in general and then introduced the efforts of the MSP team from my perspective as an author who joined KINTO Technologies in April 2024. I highlighted its usefulness and shared my future aspirations.
Unlike other tech blogs, I don't work on anything technically advanced in my daily work. Therefore, instead of discussing technology or introducing technical problems, I focused on introducing the MSP team at KINTO Technologies from my own subjective perspective. I would be happy if you have become even a little more interested in the MSP team’s efforts.