Peter Hodges
Marathon Consulting
CompTIA Managed Services Community
Time is the key asset for effective IT professionals. How you use your time can have huge effects on the success of your organization. Which tasks pop up on your to-do list every day/week/month that need to be done but take you away from the more creative aspects of your job? An effective automation strategy can give you back this time so you can reinvest it by adding proactive value for your clients.
Patch management, time sheet approval or client billing are basic examples of recurring tasks that are great candidates for automation. While straightforward tasks like patch management can be a good training ground for new engineers, having an automation process for these activities give your service manager the flexibility to use the team’s hours where they provide the most value.
Creating a solid automation process can take some time. Don’t set and forget a new automation procedure. The time spent reviewing exceptions to fine-tune your process once things start running will pay off. After a few iterations, you should be able to just let things run.
There are a number of remote monitoring and management (RMM) choices on the market — and the most important part after doing your research is to pick one. If you’re concerned that an effective RMM installation will take special coding skills or ongoing maintenance, consider outsourcing this function to a third party if the return on investment makes sense.
Other benefits to consider as you design your automation strategy:
- Ensures uniform coverage for clients. Once you get routine tasks built out on your automation platform, an immediate benefit is more uniform service delivery. If an engineer needs to manually patch large number of machines at a client, there are a wide range of things during an average day that could interrupt this work. Automation increases the efficiency and precision of these kinds of routine actions.
- Allows you to run jobs all at once instead of doing things one at a time. Even your most talented engineer with laser focus can still only work on one machine at a time. Effective automation allows you to run updates for hundreds of computers simultaneously and take advantage of your machines’ ability to multitask.
- Clones your senior engineers. Take the predictable tasks that your best team members handle and work with them to break down their approach. Automating these responsibilities frees up their time to help the rest of your team work on unique tickets and gives you coverage when your engineer is on vacation.
Automate Your Timesheet Review Process
All MSPs have to manage and approve time entries from their engineering team. If you were to create a specific ticket format for engineers to follow, your RMM tool could be configured to read the data and preapprove each time entry. Let a package of scripts review the hundreds of weekly time entries instead of your service manager and set the automation up to fix or reject recurring issues. Then your service manager would only need to review the exceptions on this important but routine task.
An added benefit of creating a uniform ticket format would be improved service delivery. When everyone on your team starts using the same format to make their time entry notes readable for the automation, it can also reduce confusion and backtracking if multiple engineers work on a ticket for a client.
Successful automation should start to pay for itself by freeing up time for your team to do the creative problem solving that adds the most value for your clients. Not sure where to start? Take a look at any checklists or procedures you’ve written for new engineers. It should be easy to turn a good checklist into an automation script. Also ask your team where they spend a lot of recurring time. They will likely have a good list of tasks you can start on to help them take back their time and make your company more productive.
Peter Hodges is the marketing director for Marathon Consulting and a member of the CompTIA Managed Services Community.
