Quick Lesson: How to Manage Workflow Rules at your MSP
What you’ll learn in this quick read:
Fast Primer: Workflow Rules & Your MSP
The Review Process We Used
Autotask 2023.1 & the WFR Audit Mechanism
WHY Autotask feels auditing WFRs regularly is a must
WFRs: Simple to Use & Implement, BUT…
It’s already March – can you believe it?!
We are well along with the info we promised would enable MSPs to grow in less than 1 year.
By now you should be starting to see that if you follow our recommendations and put in the work, not only will you grow, but Chaos will be eliminated, and a better, happier MSP will result. (Oh, and a more profitable one at that…almost forgot!).
Quick Primer: Workflow Rules & Your MSP
This week, I will share a quick but important lesson on Workflow Rules.
You may not realize what a tangled web we weave when Workflow Rules are not managed.
Workflow Rules are right up there with Security Levels and System Settings when it comes to the scary areas in Autotask configurations. Why, you ask? Because if you don’t get a grasp and start managing your WFRs at the beginning of your MSP transformation (and preferably when setting up Autotask), you are going to have a great big mess later on.
The first time the MSP I worked for tried to clean up the Workflow Rules, it took us 5 hours over a month’s time to review and make decisions on all 178 of them. Once we were through the process, we made a commitment to never allow them to go unmanaged again.
The Workflow Rules Review Process We Used…
We developed better naming conventions, a change request/approval process, and, most importantly, a quarterly review. And we were down to 58 WFRs: simple and efficient.
By the end of the year (three reviews later), the quarterly review was down to 30 minutes.
Here is the review process we used:
1) Deleted inactive WFRs because it takes longer to figure out what an inactive rule is or is not doing than it does to create one from scratch (unless you fully documented them when created – we hadn’t).
2) Reviewed WFRs that had not fired in the last 30 days:
a. We did the work to figure out who created them and why.
b. We investigated why they weren’t firing (often some other configuration change caused it to no longer work).
c. We determined if we needed the WFR going forward.
3) We reviewed the rest to see:
a. Who created it and why?
b. Is it in conflict with or duplicating another WFR?
c. Who owns the WFR going forward (someone who understands what it is doing, when it is triggered, and is able to manage it between reviews)?
d. We updated each description so anyone could easily understand what the WFR did and why.
As you can imagine, all that manual auditing was a lot of fun that we certainly didn’t want to repeat! Today, things are a little bit easier when working with the Autotask software.
Autotask 2023.1 & the WFR udit Mechanism
In the heavily anticipated Autotask 2023.1 major release, Autotask’s Anil Bandi championed the WFR Audit mechanism. This is a big (and very much appreciated) step in the right direction, and I am sure the beginning of future improvements. The Autotask WFR Audit mechanism checks:
Active Rule Capacity: The total number of active workflow rules is within 10 rules of the upper limit on the number of workflow rules for the database.
Inactive User Defined Fields: The workflow rule references a user-defined field that has been inactivated.
Inactive Static Notification Recipients: The resources who are supposed to receive the notifications were selected by name instead of based on their role, and they have since been deactivated. As a result, the notifications may not reach the intended recipients or anyone. To fix this problem, replace the static recipients with role-based recipients. Refer to Role-based notification recipients.
Recent triggers: The workflow rule has not fired in the last 90 days.
Attributes with inactive/deleted value: Attributes are the fields that contain the data for the entity. Many attributes are based on a selection of available values. This reason will appear if the specific value the workflow rule is based on or referencing has been inactivated or deleted.
WHY Autotask feels auditing WFRs regularly is a must:
If your company has automated your workflows (and we hope you have) - you may have up to 200 active workflow rules. These workflow rules may have thousands of potential attributes (that is, fields), which in turn may have tens of thousands of potential field values. Any of these fields and field values may be referenced in a workflow rule condition, action, or update.
As time goes by, all of the following will happen:
An employee leaves your company. You inactivate or redact her resource record, but unbeknownst to HR, she was the only person who was notified when the "Critical ticket missed SLA Resolution" workflow rule fired.
People get promoted and take on new roles. If they are referenced by name instead of by role, they will continue to receive notifications that should now go to their replacement.
A new service manager is updating your ticketing workflow. The lists of your ticket priorities and statuses are updated, and unused ones are inactivated. The workflow rules based on these values are orphaned and will not fire going forward, but they are still active and count towards your 200 workflow rules limit.
A new person is put in charge of the workflow rules for a specific entity. They did not create the original set of workflows and may not understand how they all work together. They inactivate some and add new ones, inadvertently causing a loop.
WFRs – Simple to Use & Implement, BUT…
As a result, your workflow rules no longer perform as expected. However, combing through them to find these issues is a difficult and time-consuming task, a task that is made a lot easier by running an automated workflow rule audit.
I think you now see why I said WFRs are one of the scary areas of Autotask. Simple to use and implement, but a very large plate of spaghetti (or new client network closet!) if not managed properly.
Now that you know what you do and why a WFR audit is so important, I hope you will spend a few hours this week and get it done while you await next week’s nugget on improving MSP profitability.
As always, if you are too busy, too overwhelmed, just want someone else to do it, or an MSP owner scared out of your mind and need a friend, please reach out. We are always here for you. Always.
A quick note to Info@AGMSPCoaching.com, and I’ll give you a free coaching call and a free ticket to our Friday peer group meeting. We’ve all worked in an MSP as Owners, Managers, Techs, or Coordinators, so we get you.
Until next time – stay profitable, my friends.
Steve & Co
The elephant in the room:
Who is Advanced Global, and why should we listen to them?
Recently someone we’ve been in communication with since DattoCon 2018, who was faithfully reading our articles, commented that up until a few months ago, “I really did not know what Advanced Global does.” So here are a few bullet points to let anyone interested know who we are and what we do:
1) We Are – the Autotask Global Service Delivery Authority
2) We Help – MSPs thrive
3) We Solve – Service Delivery issues, inefficiencies, and challenges by making sure:
a. techs know what to work on next
b. someone is managing all open tickets and driving them to completion
c. the staffing levels are correct, and the workload is balanced
d. Real-Time Time Entry is a cultural habit
e. the Client has a great client experience
f. profit is maximized
g. Autotask is being fully leveraged
h. the historical data that is in the Autotask software is accessible to benchmark, track & USE effectively
i. the Service Delivery operations can scale
j. projects are completed On-Time and On-Budget
k. the company can grow
l. MSPs know what they don’t know
4) Our Tools:
a. Autotask “Best in Class” standard build
b. Our MSP robust Service Delivery SOP library
c. Advanced Autotask Live Reports
d. Expertise in providing a transformational educational experience
Note: We are not philosophers; we are doers with 31+ years of Service Delivery experience, bringing real Service Delivery Improvement change, profitability, and Best in Class performance.
We start by offering a FREE No-Obligation PSA Configuration Evaluation