Using kanban with Autotask — In conversation with Matt Fox where he demos the Topleft Product

so hey everyone this is christian from Sondela consulting we are msp consultants we specialize in helping msps get the best out of their psa and rmm tools today with me on the call i have matt fox from top left who's going to walk us through the top left product and show us how it integrates into the psa tool so for those of you who don't know top left is a kanban solution and it's designed to help you streamline your ticketing and project process and that's going to give us so much more information about what it does so hey matt how are you doing i'm good thanks for having me chris i'm happy to show your folks about kanban and how it helps auto great thanks and if you could uh just tell us a little bit about top left you know what the product is how it works and then maybe you know take us through a little bit of a demo um just so we can see how it integrates and and how an msp could use it sure so top left came out of our own msp actually um four maybe even five years ago we had an msp called kirkoff technologies a fairly established kind of medium size msp near vancouver and canada and we were connect wise users and we you know we were always losing track of our work um because you know if you're at all familiar for those who are familiar with autotask and connect wise they're pretty good at keeping track of all the work that's going on tickets and projects and and so on like they're good at storing the data about it they're fairly weak at just um visualizing it help um showing it to you in a way that's easy to understand it's always just in these big tables reports that you kind of gotta you know you gotta get to the right report you gotta closely look at all the fields to figure out okay what's that what's the important stuff here now or you're looking if it's project you're looking at this work breakdown structure and it's not at all clear you know which tickets are progressing which ones are forgotten about uh who's assigned like it does do certain team members have too much work and things like that so the data is all there but the psas don't display it very well in a way that makes it easy to understand so um we were suffering from this you know tickets are forgotten about projects they're just dragging on no no no no no no we don't know what's going on and uh so we knew about kanban boards right um which is something that has actually been around for a while i it hasn't really caught on in it until recently um but basically it's like uh just a board the main thing and i'll show you an example is that like that that's like a trello type exactly yeah yes so trello is probably the best known example of uh of a kanban board like a software kanban board but of course you don't need software you can uh you can do this with sticky notes on a wall if you want you know the point is you got the columns from left to right uh the columns represent the stages in your work if you imagine you know the life cycle of a ticket for example uh you know it starts out in like new it goes to some triage it gets assigned you know maybe it is waiting on the customer for a while and finally it's done you know so basically we represent visually you know because people understand stuff better when it's made visual and so we you know we knew trello there's other software now you know like asana um jira things like that all have ms microsoft planner it's another good example so there's lots of examples of software kanban boards now but none of them integrate directly with connectwise or autotask okay so um that we could have used that but we're like the data is there let's build something that gives us the visualization without having us to copy the data back and forth between these different systems so that's how our top left kanban boards started for us at our own msp and uh we still we still continue to use it today and and now we're offering it to many msps all over the world who are using connectwise or autotask and have the same sort of problems okay and this is so so you mentioned this is something you custom built so this isn't a a trello integration or an asana integration this is actually something you guys actually built out of the box yeah yeah so um it's more uh i can well it's a plug-in basically for uh connectwise or autotask so you know if you think of it as like it glue or time zest or whatever it's equivalent to that in that it uses the apis in the psa grabs the data out shows it in a new way and what that means is that we can integrate much more closely than we ever could if you were going to go and like build your own integration to trello or planner or whatever like as an example you can actually enter your time uh on a ticket in these kanban boards and i can show that in a bit but it's very very close integration uh only for msps only for connect wise and auto task very specialized okay that's cool so um and and so you say it's for for tickets and and projects is there anything else you do with it do you do sort of the um the account side if somebody wanted to run this through opportunities you know and if not is there any kind of um you know is that something that you guys are going to do in in the future or how does it work yeah so on the when we plug into connect wise then we offer support for the opportunities so you can have you know the key stages of your sales workflow and represent the opportunities uh in the right stage understand what's going on that works for connectwise already and it is going to come for autotask we don't support that just yet but we are planning to in the near-ish future not in the next month or two but it is fairly high on a roadmap okay and in terms of the um so why would an msp sort of use a kanban board or or a tool like top left and not just do stuff directly in in their psa tool uh well there's a couple of reasons one is first of all that is it's just easier to understand what's going on like i had said before if you're doing this in your psa probably you're spending a lot of time looking at these um reports just tables like it may as well be excel and it doesn't really help you understand what's the important bits that you need to know about to keep your work moving forward like you're always searching for it like if you know uh you want to look for tickets that haven't been touched in seven days for example you got to go to the right report to find that and you got to find the right column and the right to and like sort it in the right way it just doesn't make it very easy to do that sort of thing okay so it's time-consuming and it's because it's time consuming probably just doesn't get done uh you know it's got to be easy so that's one reason is that kanban makes it easy to do all this stuff because it's one tool and it's just showing you all the important stuff all at once in a way that's just easier to much easier to understand the second thing is that it's a good communications tool for your whole team so you know your manager is going to be looking at one view or dispatcher but the engineers are also looking at the same view so if um you know we're highlighting that a certain ticket hasn't been touched in 10 days for example you know manager is going to want to know about that but it's even better if the engineers can see that and so um you know once uh once the company has been using kanban for a little while they've gotten into the practice of using it you end up that the manager doesn't even like that that case doesn't even happen necessarily that there's a ticket that hasn't been touched in 10 days because the engineers can see the same thing and they they can deal with these problems themselves because again it's easier it's easy for them to see the problem and they tend to stop it before it happens you know they follow up at the right time or they just keep the data up to date you know there's not tickets that are already done but they're sitting in in progress or waiting or or whatever because it's easy to see for example um you know it's easy to see the things that uh the tickets that are in progress it's shown in the kanban board very clearly and uh if they recognize that there's something that's incorrect you know a ticket that is actually complete but it says this in progress all i gotta do is like drag and drop you know it's you can fix it immediately so um it's easier to use which means that the data tends to be more accurate because it's easy to fix it when it's not okay and you talk about tickets that are you know in the various statuses so in uh top left is this something that you know as an engineer can actually create a ticket in it or does the ticket have to still be created in the psa tool first and then um you know and then kanban picks it up or top left picks it up or is it something that um you know i don't even have to go into my psa tool to do anything um yeah so at the moment you're going to create the tickets in the psa tool you can't create those tickets within kanban just yet but uh one of our focuses for for this quarter that we're in right now is making those sorts of use cases possible so one thing that we have uh coming up right now in fact part of it is is becoming available now is editing the tickets within kanban changing the titles and budgets and due dates and so on uh and creating those tickets is something that we plan to offer in this quarter as well so that's coming up and the whole point of it like you said is that you can spend more time in the fast and easy to use tool in kanban rather than having to go back to the psa to do some of those things okay and on the psa tools you've mentioned two of them connect wise and and all the tasks are those the only two that you're integrating with at the moment and um and if so are there plans to integrate with any of the others uh yeah so those are the two we integrate with right now now if you go to our website top left dot team there's a right today there is a link at the top that says syncro msp and that's because we were collecting basically expressions of interest for customers who are using syncro and who would want to be able to have kanban boards with that so synchro customers absolutely we'd love to hear from you head over there and put your name in the form there so we can so we know how much interest there is that for us that's uh going to be the number three psa to support i would expect okay cool now that sounds really cool i mean do you want to give us a very quick um sort of rundown of the product show us what it can do um you know because i think it's it's going to be a lot easier if people can actually see what what it's doing and and see how it works so do you want to go through that absolutely so here is an example of a top left kanban board this one is uh connected into an auto task instance and uh you can see the basics are it's a pretty typical kanban board these columns here represent the key stages in the works so you can see that it's kind of tracking the lifecycle of a ticket new ready uh typically you see tickets go from ready to in progress if they get stuck on something it might go back to waiting finally they'd go over to complete now these columns are totally configurable like these are not the stan there's no standard columns of course we have some recommendations but you can do whatever you want you can have as many columns as you want give them whatever names you want and the key thing is that the columns map into the ticket statuses so um you know based on the status that a ticket is in and how the statuses are mapped to those columns that's what will define which column a ticket appears in so that makes it really easy to see even just at a glance uh what's going on with my work here you know in a real world environment you probably don't want to have 15 new tickets because you're probably you should have some sort of triage process that uh fairly quickly moves those over into like a ready or a signed status something like that so um you know you can see here just at a glance with a large number of tickets in the new column maybe there's some triage work to do i can see okay 24 in the ready column um you know depending on your size of the your team that might be too many might be too few uh you know what we got for in progress you can see is uh 54 tickets in progress again depending on the size of the team that might be way too many or it might might be fine but you can see based on the number of tickets in the columns is your work kind of um getting to a certain point and installing which is not an easy question to answer in connect wise or auto task but in kanban boards they can make that pretty pretty straightforward to understand and now looking at the individual cards here each of these cards represents a ticket in this example out of auto task and you know all of the information comes straight out of auto task there's no double entry of any data and you can see it's just it's just um the key data is highlighted here and you know you don't have to go and review tables of data really closely or work breakdown structures or whatever because the key stuff is highlighted like the title like the company like here we can see who's assigned to the ticket even things like how what status it's in and how long it's been there is kind of a key that's a pretty key thing to know and um your psas make it difficult to see that sort of thing um you can see actually here that uh some a lot of these tickets are highlighted because they haven't changed uh what i mean is this field here the length of time they've been in that status it's highlighted because we can set a threshold on the column to say okay once uh once it's been in in progress for more than three days for example then highlight that field in red because if it's been there for three days that's stalled now we want to know about that we want it so we can focus on that and figure out whatever whatever the problem is and keep that stuff moving forward can we so sorry i was just going to ask so on that when you you talked about it's been in that status for a particular length of time can that be kind of besides just the colors can that be flagged or maybe moved to a different status or something or um pulling a different column for somebody to to look at tickets that have not been actioned for a particular length of time um yeah i mean there's a couple differences between our auto task and connect wise side um on the can we are going to be implementing this all not quite at the same level as the connect wise side but unconnect wise you can highlight a ticket like that and give it a different background color and emphasize it in a in a greater way you know if this sort of red tag isn't quite enough you can uh emphasize that ticket more and there's also a number of conditions that you can use in this kind of rules engine that can can take tickets in certain ways in terms of you know moving it to another status under certain conditions that's not something that we've tried to solve because the psas actually have decent support for that sort of thing in their own workflows both connectwise and autotask and because we just show the data that you already have in connectwise or autotask you can just continue to use those workflow automations in fact whatever you've already set up is going to continue to work if you have a trigger that changes a ticket to a different status it's going to continue to run and we get that change and so it's whatever you've already set up is going to continue to work which could you know depending on how you've set it up could result in tickets moving between the columns if they change the status one example is that we see from time to time is if if a customer responds it gets bumped to a different status that's kind of a common one and so if you did want to have a special place to show tickets that were in the customer responded status you could pretty easily set that up with a new column you map that customer responded status to it and now you've got one column where you see all of those tickets okay that's cool yeah that looks really good that i i can see what you mean that makes it so much easier for um you know for anyone to to kind of you know visually see what's happening on the system um you know nicely color-coded and then i guess you can just drag those cards from one one to the other so and that's the thing if i drag something from the new to say the in progress or what have you then i'm assuming that's just going to go into the psa um whichever one whichever psa it is and just change the status accordingly that's right so uh it's all drag and drop you know it's not just a visualization tool but it's actually interactive you can drag and drop just like it did so you can see it's been updated now it's in the in progress status and if we went back to auto task to look at that ticket it would reflect that it's now in the in progress status already so um it makes it easy to adopt because everything that you're already doing is just going to continue to work you know any workflows and patterns you've got set up in in your psa it's going to continue to work because we're showing you the exact same data so you know if you continue to work out of auto task it's going to show that status it's just a lot easier to do here in top left so in addition to being able to drag between the columns here you can actually drag up and down within a column and if you're using like agile practices and kanban practices you can use that as a way to communicate in your team what is the priority of these tickets so for example a dispatcher could keep their eye on the tickets that are in the ready status and make sure that any emergency ones which are kind of maybe indicated by the color of the left bar here any of those emergency tickets they stay at the top and that the being at the top means that their highest priority which means that technicians when they're ready to take on new work they come to the top of this column here and that's something that connectwise and autotask aren't very good at uh aren't very good at indicating typically with that you would need to actually put it into somebody's calendar uh and you know order them properly in the calendar and that can be quite a bit of work to to do even once but it's fragile and so when you're using that kind of pattern you tend to have to reschedule a lot of stuff and so it's actually quite time consuming for a dispatcher but this is a lot more flexible and a lot easier to handle okay so just a question around this then in terms of um how this works for an engineer do you have a a mobile app that somebody could use for this as well or is it just purely a web-based application it's a web-based application but we have done work to make sure that it's as easy to use as possible within a mobile browser so it should be a decent experience in a mobile browser okay so there's no native app on the on the app stores or anything like that no no but you just have any plans to do that uh maybe and it's something that we're going to keep in mind we are eyeing kind of a some fairly significant improvements to how the app is designed and we're going to try to keep that in mind as we do that to consider okay how could we make sure that once we're done this restructuring of the application as a whole that we have the right foundation to make it easy to make a web app because that does get we do hear requests like that from time to time but it's actually not that common okay um that's cool and so so what you're showing here is is tickets you're showing the service desk so um and you mentioned about this uh you know using the projects in all the tasks as well so is it going to show the entire project as well as all the tasks or does it just show the tasks or can you kind of have a combination of both uh yeah so let me show you what we can do for projects now we can show uh all the project tasks uh now here's a here's a good example uh this um really helps project managers we have people coming to us all the time frustrated with their project management modules both in connectwise and auto task what they do is uh they spend a lot of time uh the the model is kind of um and the model is like this because this is what the psa support is that they choose a project one of their many projects they pick one to manage so you know you go to the project list you click into it you see the details on the project you do some stuff you kind of zoom back out to your list of projects you choose another one you zoom in you do the work you go back out and you do the next one so that's what the psas support but it's not how project managers and msps actually work because everybody's got multiple projects on the go all at one time right msps don't do i mean you know the typical ones that we work with they don't do million dollar projects that 20 people are working on just managing a single project at a time you know they're managing many kind of small and medium-sized projects okay multiple projects yeah so what we really need is a view where we can see the details of multiple projects all at once and that's this view here so now we're looking at the project tasks in in auto task terms and we put them in what we call swim lanes you can see that there's this horizontal group here uh and what it's doing is it's grouping all the tasks from a single project into the one swim lane that we call it so in practice what this is is each project that's ongoing right now gets a gets an area here and within that it shows the individual tasks okay and so we have one lane one swim lane here for each of the ongoing projects and there's there's a lot of ways to filter this stuff so if you've got like i don't know maybe you've got um multiple larger msp might have different project teams well you can filter the boards so that you just see the projects for that team like there's a variety of ways to do that um but this is what uh can save a project manager a lot of time by being able to see the details of multiple projects at once and you know say same things work you know you can drag and drop tickets within uh you know between the different columns to do some planning uh you can do that you know just to keep things up to date the engineers can use this as well there is a way that for example someone can edit this board just to show their own not just their own tickets so i can demonstrate that here so if i am a a project engineer for example i'm logged in here as a pamela and if i want to say just show me the tickets that i'm assigned to then i can pretty easily do this and now i've got a good view that's showing me the things that i'm responsible for in in the project side that's cool yeah i know i i really like that view i think and you know like you said one of the big problems with with the psas is that they um you know they design very much for you to work on on a project and then um you know almost finish that project and then work on the next one or if you are working on multiple ones you can only see you know whatever's happening with that particular project at any time so this is really good that gives you the ability to not just see the multiple projects but actually see the multiple tasks within each one of those projects as well yeah and this one as an example is showing some features here uh that are useful for planning um so you can see at a variety of levels here we're showing summaries of the estimated hours for these tasks uh so you can see actually both the uh the number of hours that are actually logged on that uh as well as at like the total budget hours so you can see this like this number is showing you for the entire board uh right now the tickets that we see uh we can see it within each swim lane here like so for this particular project we like the tickets we see here sum up to 10 hours estimated total and we can see it for each column as well so because i don't have an example here that has multiple uh tasks within it but you know if i did it would show it would add them all together and show it here so um what this allows us to do is do some better planning um you could see if a certain project has a lot of um a lot of budgeted hours in a certain column for example we could compare not just the number of tickets between these two projects right because maybe one is a project that by its nature the tickets are a lot bigger and one project has tickets that are just very simple tickets a low number of hours on them and so instead like for example maybe we could have a project that both had three tickets uh in the waiting status right now or are you ready or whatever status it might be and uh but we could look here and see okay you know actually this one has 40 hours in these three tickets estimated versus this one that just has five or ten and uh when it adds it up for us then we can we have a lot better knowledge about what's going on actually going on with these projects we do the same thing here let me show you an example that adjusts how the swim lanes work uh these are again this is a swimlane board but we're showing um we're grouping it by in a different way now we're grouping it by who's assigned to these tickets okay so this gives us a lot of insight into how things are actually working in our team and it's not just useful for projects but this is very useful for service teams as well and you can do the exact same thing when you're looking at the service tickets so we can see here tickets that are unassigned that's pretty useful to know about what you typically have is that tickets in your new status here are unassigned but you know for example when they're in progress they shouldn't be unassigned so this is all you know even just this swim lane gives us some useful information about what's happening either in our project or our service team and then we have swim lanes for each member of the team and this is where we can see like is how is the work balanced in our team do we have um have we kind of given an even amount of work to all of our different engineers which is kind of the ideal way to do it then you don't have someone who's super busy and beginning to delay some of the work because they're so busy while and other engineers are not not busy enough now you can start to see that sort of thing which again something that the psas aren't very good at explaining but here it becomes quite apparent for example we can pretty easily see here that gary has nine tickets in progress we can even see you know the the sum of the worked hours four hours worked on all these tickets so far compared to michael here who's only got one and which doesn't even have any time logged on it so we can see very clearly here you know gary's got too much work most most likely is because he's the senior engineer he's kind of the expert on everything so that's why he tends to get more work but now he's become the bottleneck in the team okay so anything that has to go through gary is gonna go slow meaning any of the sophisticated and difficult stuff gets slowed down in the team and so if we can start to make some changes in our team like document certain things better so that a junior person can do them or you know actually get some better training for the junior engineers then we can start to get them more work take some work away from gary and then that's going to like be because gary's the bottleneck right now the only way to make the whole team go faster is to fix the bottle the one bottleneck can we you can identify that and fix it yeah so in terms of the um you know where you see there like you say gary's got more more tickets i'm assuming that's obviously the same project so could we just move something from from gary into to michael and then have it assigned to to michael at that point so is that yeah so yeah in a view like this if that's your solution you say you know what um this particular ticket gary does not need to be the one doing that we i know that this is something michael can do then then you're right all you gotta do is drag it up there i'm in auto task we also need to set a roll so we can say okay what's the role here and it's just gonna go out it's gonna pull gary off that ticket and add michael on to that ticket very easy to fix that that's awesome that's really nice and quick i um yeah i really like that approach and i think that's gonna you know for anyone working with with projects um you know on on all the tasks or on connect wise yeah i mean that's an absolute game changer i think in terms of the way those uh that that specific thing i mean just even that on its own it's brilliant that you can um you know you can have that visual representation of what's going on and then just move something over into into a different user and have it automatically assigned to them yeah you can fix that quite quick i mean and again technicians can do this sort of thing too like it doesn't have to be just a manager's job but you know if a couple technicians got together and and they wanted to work through this sort of thing themselves um then they they can do the exact same thing so it can save them time as well in fact i not too long ago i talked to a customer i was i was amused that he did this but i'm happy that he he wanted to do this exercise he had a project in his psa and he needed to make changes to about 50 tickets i think he said and so he went like they were in the wrong statuses and maybe assigned to the wrong people and so on so he started his stomp watch he went into the psa and made all these changes it took him about 45 minutes to make these changes then he undid everything that he did uh he put it he kind of reset it this project and then he made all the same changes in the top left and he said it took him 13 minutes to do that so you know even just in terms of the simple changes assigning somebody or chain fixing the status of a ticket is just much much faster absolutely and now i i notice you've been going into a different board for tickets and and project tasks and and what have you so can you kind of mix and match these you can have one board that has project tasks and tickets on it or is is that not something that it does at the moment uh yeah good question so again this is one of the differences a little bit between how we connect to connect wise and auto tasks going connect wise you can show service and project tickets together you know of course it's very useful because a lot of msps until they grow to a larger msp the fact is that people are working on both service help desk and project stuff so it's very useful to show them together now on the auto task side we don't support that just yet you can have one kanban board to show the service work and one or more kanban boards to show the project work that is something that we're going to do though again that's something that's pretty close to the top of our road now because it's very useful thing and auto task folks want to be able to do this for sure absolutely that's that's really cool i mean you know matt i think we can you know we can spend hours going through this and i'm sure there's a huge amount more that that we can do but i mean yeah what you've shown us there is is absolutely fantastic and i think anyone watching this this video on youtube i think would um would agree that this is absolutely gonna just yeah it's a massive game changer i think it's just gonna um you know change the way that msps work and make them a lot more efficient and and certainly streamline you know both the ticketing and the project process so yeah and it really can streamline the technician's day as well um i didn't even show you this last couple of things but uh we have ways to enter the time um so this is something that keeps the engineers work working pretty efficiently as well when they can just enter their time and their notes on these tickets that they're working um straight from from top left including using a timer oh wow yeah i see you've got to stop that that's cool as well so so really it is that you know pretty much once the ticket is created in in all the tasks or connect wise you don't really need to go back into the psa tool and and do anything in there you can pretty much do um you know the majority of it through through top left yeah and so if you do have um i mean everybody has the email connector right so any tickets that come straight in from the email connector you maybe you don't even need to go into the psa at all for that you know because they are created automatically and even if they're not you know they come in from the phone or or just project tickets um again that's something that we're planning to implement uh fairly soon so and actually that brings up another question then so you know we're using top left here and we're looking at um at this view now what happens if i wanted to go in and have a look at one of those tickets in in the psa um in this case all the tasks is there is there an easy way for me to just click on something and go straight in and look at the ticket directly in autotask yeah you just click on the title here okay cool one click okay and that just opens it up awesome okay that's really cool now i think that's um that's awesome matt there's uh there's some really really good stuff in here um and i definitely think this is going to get some people to uh you know to really think about it and contact you guys and and hopefully um you know get some get some demos from you and hopefully get you know uh get this product implemented in their business so um that's been really cool um so just a quick um yeah just as we sort of wrap this up um if anybody wanted to get in touch with with top left or wanted to speak to you directly what what's the best way that somebody can do that yeah good question so just go to the website top left dot team so there's more information about the product here as well as a link to get a demo so that would be the first thing to do after you do the demo then we offer a couple of different options for a trial we have a two-week free trial that you can get access to after a demo uh we also have one i'll just mention briefly is it kind of goes with this new program we've introduced called the completed ticket challenge so that's for folks who kind of feel like this like this technician here he can hardly work because he's just got so much work right we know a lot of msps feel like that from time to time and that's where we came from and uh so now we have a three-week program where uh you get um email four days a week you get emails that explain these specific steps that you can implement uh in a service or project team to begin handling this basically better ways to work to avoid feeling like this that you're just kind of running around like a chicken with your head cut off so you get email video content four days a week about that then on friday there's a call with every all the other msps doing the project doing this program at the same time so there's a community element and that's helped a couple a number of msps really cut down the number of tickets that they have ongoing at any one time that's kind of the whole point is to get in the habit of completing tickets before you start new tickets to avoid uh avoid being like this guy here um so that with that trial it's a three weeks program so we extend the trial out to four weeks it's 199 us dollars uh probably worthwhile price just for the content but you know it doubles the length of the trial so so those are the two trial options that we have to get started so um very easy you know no commitment necessarily and uh yeah yeah no that's that's great and i'll i'll absolutely make sure that uh that we get some you know some information below in the in in the notes so um you know if anyone wants to to leverage that offer we'll make sure we get it in there and and they can contact you for more information so um now that's been really cool uh matt i really really appreciate that so um you know if if you want to see any more of these kind of videos um or you know you want to hear from any other particular vendors you know let us know hit the subscribe button below and uh and and we'd love to hear from you so thanks everyone for watching and thanks matt for your time yeah thanks tim thanks