[7] Project and Ticket Templates

Welcome to PSA Impact, your podcast for all things PSA, RMM, and MSP, with your hosts, Rayanne Buccianico and Chris Tim. Learn how to get the most out of your PSA tool and manage your business by maximizing profitability and increasing efficiency within your MSP business. Let's listen in. Hi, everybody, and welcome to another episode of PSA Impact with your hosts, Rayanne and Chris. With me, I have my co-host, Rayanne Buccianico.

How are you doing today, Rayanne? Hey, Chris. I'm doing pretty good today. So fall is definitely settling in here in the United States. I'm sure it's already there in the UK.

So things are going pretty well here as we head into the holiday season. So what are we going to talk about today? Well, yeah, so things are going pretty well here as well. It's getting pretty dark. I was driving home from work or from a client at 4.30 p.m. today, and it was already dark.

So yeah, we're definitely heading into autumn or fall, as you guys call it. So yeah, hopefully summer comes around pretty quick again. So today, what I wanted to really talk about, Rayanne, there was a really interesting question actually on Facebook all about asking what are the differences, the major differences between project templates and ticket templates and when they should be used and when one should be used over the other. So I wonder if you had any thoughts on those. I do have a lot of thoughts on these.

So when we're talking about projects, right, when I think of a project, I think of this big project, the one you set up the phases and all of the tasks, and you kind of build your template on the project. And this is great for, say, those larger projects of redoing an entire network for, let's say, a customer. When we're talking about onboarding customers, I think that a project would be a little overkill. You don't need to separate it out in phases and put together a bunch of tasks. You're doing this one, you're doing that, and so on and so forth and going back and forth.

I think that creating the ticket template with maybe even a checklist involved would be the better way to go. But I'd like to hear your take on this. How do you handle things like onboarding new clients into your systems? That's a great question, Ryan, and again, of course, you know what I'm going to say. It's one of my favorite topics to talk about.

And I agree. I think using a project for onboarding of new customers, I think, is a little bit of an overkill. I would typically use a ticket for that, and I would use a ticket category as an onboarding ticket category. Because what you can do with that is you can then have a bunch of checklists, as you say, you can check off various items as and when you're working on them. You can also, one of the really nice things about those checklists as part of a ticket category, you can actually link those to knowledge-based articles as well.

So if there's certain things that you need to do or your engineers need to go ahead and do, you can check those off as part of that overall onboarding or offboarding process. Now in saying that, you can actually use those ticket categories as well in project tasks. For what this question was about, I would personally say that I think from onboarding clients, I definitely think that ticket is the right way to go. He was also asking about the kind of major differences between ticket templates and project templates. And there are really two major distinct differences between the two.

A ticket template is really more a speed code. So that kind of allows you to pre-fill in some information on the ticket. So things like the ticket title or the work type or the issue type or all of those kinds of things can be pre-filled in with something called a speed code. So just saving your engineers a lot of time in doing that. Whereas a project template is more of an actual project that you build out with those phases and tasks and what have you that you spoke about earlier on.

And then you can use that to actually build that bigger project for when it comes to things like maybe office moves or even an Office 365 installation or some kind of cloud installation where you need a bunch of different steps and you need to be able to track time against each one of those different steps that you're doing. That's when I would typically use a project over a ticket and a ticket category. Yeah, I would totally agree with that. And I'm a huge fan of the speed code because with the speed code you can really standardize everything that your techs do. If you think about it like let's take the decision making away from the tech or the engineer that's doing the work.

They don't need to worry about whether this is covered under a contract or what work type this should be posted under and what's the issue and what's the sub-issue. If we're talking about things that we do repetitively, onboarding new employees for our customers and offboarding former employees and setting up a brand new system or testing back up, create your checklist, get them into the ticket, create the speed code or the template for those tickets so that when those tickets come in, you can just simply pick that up or even the tech or the service manager can pick those speed codes up and the ticket's now created in under 10 or 15 seconds. Whereas if you have to fill out each one of the individual box, it's this issue, it's this sub-issue, it's this work type on this contract, that's too much thinking, I think, for the tech or the engineer who's actually going to be doing the work. That type of thinking needs to happen at the management or dispatch level, is my thought. Absolutely.

And I mean, those speed codes, again, one of my favorite things to use on the system. One of the things I think they really help with as well is spelling mistakes, right? Because how many techs are going to enter something like a time entry and spell something wrong? One of the great things you can use a speed code for is for that, for putting those canned responses, if you like, onto a ticket, your engineer simply clicks a box and everything is pre-filled in. And actually, I was working with a client just recently, in fact, and we were talking about speed codes.

And one of the things we did is we put a time entry speed code onto the ticket that simply just had the words, for example, you know, I've tried to contact you on the telephone today, you were not available, so I left a voice message for you. And we automatically added five minutes of time to that. So the engineers just pick that speed code. It sends an email out to the customer saying, we tried to call you, we left a message for you, automatically logs the time, you know, and that's one of those repetitive tasks you were talking about that, you know, their engineers are constantly having to update the ticket with those words. So we just built that as a speed code or a template and put that information into there.

And that just made it much more effective, much more efficient for them, like you say, only being able to then create tickets in a couple of clicks and a few seconds to create a ticket. What a great point. You know, when you think about speed codes or ticket templates or form templates of any type, you think about setting up the ticket. Very few people, I think, even use the templates for the time entries. And it is available.

So if you are ran backup, tested backup, you know, did a test restore or something, and if you're doing that 20 times a month for 20 different customers, rather than having to type that summary note every time, just have that time entry. We've allotted 15 minutes for, you know, testing and restoring backup for each customer, you know, as part of our monthly maintenance plan. So well, yeah, that's a great idea to start using that, not just the speed codes for the tickets themselves, but for also the time entries for the repetitive tasks. Absolutely. So, I mean, I typically nowadays, I don't actually use speed codes necessarily to create the tickets.

And the reason being is I think that the ticket categories do a really good job of that. You know, things like pre-filling in, you know, the issue type, the work type, the subject of the ticket, the description, all those kind of cool things, you know, determining what contract is part of all of that can now be taken care of actually from the ticket category side. So I kind of almost think, is it even worth having a speed code for the actual creation of the ticket? Because you can do all of those anyway, pretty much with a ticket category. So I tend to use the speed codes or the ticket templates or form templates or whatever, you know, word Autotask chooses this month to use for those.

You know, I tend to use those typically for time entries because that's where you're going to be doing a lot of the repetitive tasks. A lot of the other stuff can be taken care of from ticket categories. As you were talking, you know, I started to think about these ticket categories that you were talking about. So can you tell me a little bit more about, you're not talking about the issues and the sub-issues, you're talking about something completely different, categorizing these tickets. Tell me a little bit more about how you use those.

Absolutely. Yeah. So, yeah, I'm not talking about issue types and sub-issue types and categorizing tickets in that way. I'm talking about the ticket category itself. So, you know, when you open up a new ticket screen, you'll see a dropdown list for ticket category right at the top.

And then you'll see things like standard and AM alert and those kinds of things that come out of the box. Now, one of the nice things with those categories is, is you can literally categorize your tickets in any way that you want. So, for example, you know, I have one that says customer onboarding, customer off-boarding. And when I click on that, what it allows me to do is to really change the look and feel of that ticket. Right.

So if I say customer onboarding down the left-hand side, you know, where I have all the fields, I might choose not to show issue type and sub-issue type. So I might just want to completely get rid of that. Or I might want to completely get rid of things like, you know, like the queue. I don't necessarily want to have that queue displayed. I can completely get rid of it.

The other really nice thing I can do at that ticket category level is I can actually choose that at that particular ticket category, whatever that category is, I can actually, you know, talk about those issue types. I might say for a ticket category of customer onboarding, I'm going to make the issue type and the sub-issue type compulsory. So my engineers have to fill them in, or I can actually have the ticket category pre-fill them in for me. And then I might say the same thing with user-defined fields on that. I can actually specify specific user-defined fields.

And then what I can do is say, you know, if I've got customer offboarding, maybe there's a bunch of user-defined fields that I need to have on that ticket. And again, I can make those compulsory based on that ticket category. But for a different ticket category, I cannot even show them at all if I want to. So really, really kind of allows you to essentially customize the look and feel of the ticket, allows the information that you want on there. And then from there, you can then add things like checklists.

So you can then say, you know, if this is an onboarding ticket, these are a bunch of the things that you need to check off, the tasks that you need to do against this ticket. But if I have a different ticket, like a password reset, it's going to have a completely different set of questions and maybe a completely separate checklist, whatever the case might be. So really what I was talking about earlier on was the ticket category that is a fairly new feature in Autotask that really allows you to change completely the look and feel of the tickets. That's really fascinating. And you know what I really love about it is the fact that it's completely customizable as well as the ticket type.

So you've got not only the ticket category, but there's the ticket type too. And that's also customizable, is it not? Absolutely. So what you can do on that ticket category, you can say, you know, so again, if this was a password reset, I might make the ticket type be a service request. But maybe if it's a, you know, something more crucial, you know, maybe it's, I don't know, an exchange issue or something else.

An incident or whatever. I can then, yeah, whatever it is, I can then say, actually, for this type of category, it's going to be an incident or it's going to be a problem, whatever the case might be. So that's the beauty of ticket categories, right, is it really allows your engineers to not have to do a lot of thinking, right? They just simply click on a ticket category and everything is pre-filled in for them, you know, and then based on whatever the information is that you want on there. So you know, and again, I was actually working with a client.

In fact, just today, I was working with a client about, you know, putting specific user defined fields. And one of the things they wanted to do is move those right to the top. Because if you remember in the old days on Autotask, the user defined fields used to be all the way down at the bottom. But you can nowadays move those all the way to the top if you want to. And you can actually have different sections for them as well.

I figured this out today that, you know, by default, they get created as a section called user defined fields, but you can rename that section. And then what you can do is you can then take, have different sections. So you might say, you know, these three questions that we're going to ask are pertaining to the user. And then the next three set of questions that we need you to fill in, for example, boxes we need you to fill in, whatever you want to call them, which are user defined fields. Those might be pertaining to the site itself.

So we're actually going to put them into a completely different section on the ticket. So really, to me, I mean, that's why I love the ticket category so much. There's so much potential with what you can do with them. And just allows you to, you know, work much more effectively and much more efficiently with those tickets. This has really been fascinating.

I'm going to have to actually get in there and start to play around with them and see what all I can do with them as well. So thank you for that. Learn something new every day. Absolutely. And, you know, it's a shame this isn't a video podcast, because I can show you pretty much how to do this.

And maybe what we need to do at some point is to put this as a YouTube, you know, video so that people can actually see how to do this more effectively. And, you know, I guess here's a shout out to all of our listeners. If you guys want to actually see stuff and you want to actually see us do things and you think having a, you know, a video podcast on how to actually do these things, then reach out, let us know. Because if that's what you guys want, then we might be able to extend these podcasts and try and make them a bit more, you know, so you guys can actually see what we're talking about rather than just hear us talking about them. I would love that.

Thanks so much, Chris. Awesome. Thank you very much, Rayanne. And we will see you on the next episode. So your PSA is the key to your MSP success.

Go out and make an impact today. Thank you for joining us today on PSA Impact. We hope you've learned something and that you'll join us next time when we answer new questions posed by our listeners.