The Lean MSP: The Frankenstack

One of the biggest barriers to getting lean is the Frankenstack. Sometimes, reality gets in the way of the ideal. Each little piece of your stack is added, one new client at a time, one tool at a time. Taken individually, no one piece seems particularly egregious. But taken together, they’re a monster.

The Frankenstack contributes to two forms of waste in particular: inventory waste and production waste. Inventory waste is simple – the more tech you use, the more money you’re spending on tech. Whether it’s licenses for SaaS applications or just the time it takes your team to learn each part of your stack, you’re tying up time and money in your stack. If you’re using two or three different things to perform the same task, when you could just use one, that’s a lot of extra waste.

The other issue is production waste. It is far easier to train your techs on one firewall versus five or six firewalls. Plus, they’ll be able to attain a higher level of skill on that one firewall if it’s the only one they have to know. Instead of trying to remember how to do something in each one, or having to look up the SOP, they can just learn the task and be able to perform that task without trying to remember it, and without having to look anything up.