Implementing HaloPSA – Setting up Departments and teams

hi everyone it's Chris Timm here in this new series I'm going to be doing a Halo implementation from start to finish it's a new series we're going to be doing on on the YouTube channel and with me today um I have uh one of my favorite people from from Halo Morgan aspinal and they very kindly linked me Morgan to um help us through this whole implementation stage so Morgan's going to go through with us step by step on how you would set up and install um that the Halo product by the end of this series you'll have a complete um a complete installation and implementation of of Halo so um without much further Ado hi Morgan how you doing and thank you very much for joining me yeah yeah hi Chris thank you um I'm flattered one of your favorite people at Halo um yeah I'm looking forward to sort of demonstrating the steps uh that I follow with customers that I onboard uh taking the the trial environment of payload to a more personalized um sort of uh more personalized configuration so yeah we'll be covering all of the the core aspects of an implementation from my perspective and have a look at some of the neat features along the way let's get stuck in cool yeah yeah um so we've just spun up a trial today so I'll share my screen and we'll see what yeah so um when you get the when you get the trial it might be slightly different this is a trial configuration as of today as I mentioned uh but most of the the configuration options should be fairly familiar so as we're going through making changes sort of looking at different areas of the system uh it should be fairly easy to follow so generally um before you start sorry you haven't actually shared out your your screen oh sorry sorry there you go yeah yeah so this is the um this is the home page once you spin up the trial as I mentioned a lot of the configuration options will be familiar with the trial when you get it so so following along should be quite straightforward um so the procedure that I tend to follow with an initial implementation is firstly by taking a look at your internal organization setting up your your departments and teams making sure that you get all of your techs into Halo making sure that they have the correct permissions allocated to them from that we'll move on to looking at the service desk uh ticket type configuration actions workflows statuses slas all of that kind of stuff and a lot of what we see there will be very transferable which is why from that we'll probably move on to CRM and projects around about that time as the configuration for CRM opportunities and projects it's very similar to that of the service desk then we'll move on to uh sort of tying the tying it together by looking at the the billing features invoicing creating agreements Etc and uh take it from there cool and interestingly just having a look at what you've just shown me there to to any sort of Halo users that are familiar with the interface will probably notice a you know a massive difference in the um in the user interface is is this a new thing um that's that's coming out a new sort of um updated interface on on Halo uh I I believe so I mean we we changed the the trial configuration from time to time and I think this is the the latest iteration of of that configuration uh the the idea is to sort of highlight some of the the latest and greatest features that Halo have put in place um so I mean if if what you're looking at here interests you for sure spin up a new trial have a play about and any questions uh reach out to the support team at Halo excellent great well um yeah so you know let's let's make a start and kind of you know look at if somebody was was taking Halo for the first time and wanted to um uh you know start setting up the product themselves where would you know where would be the first place they would go um and and where would they start to set up um the the first the first bits of the configuration yeah yeah sure well the the hint was in the um the last word about sentence there configurations so uh the the module where you'll be going to to make almost all of the changes in Halo is the configuration module um so from the home screen you see all of the modules that are currently available and enabled and at the end there we have our configuration so this is where we make all of the the changes to settings in Halo you'll also see this menu icon in the top left you can click on that to expand the menu at any time again you'll see the same options in here as what you see on the home page so if we go into configuration this is effectively where you'll be changing all of the all of the settings in hello as I mentioned um and the the first place that I tend to go is the the organization configuration um that way we can set up our agents and make sure that they have access to the things that they should have access to and not access to anything that they shouldn't so you can get there sorry sorry can I just say um um when you when you refer to agents I'm assuming so people that are coming in from from other PSA tools um an agent is typically a a technician or an engineer yeah correct yeah yeah yeah um I I mean kind of a bit of an aside here are I not not self-proclaimed but I'd like to think of myself as the Halo expert but I'm by no means the the PSA expert um in general so uh I call them agents but but yeah Chris if you could help me with some of the translation between um you know Halo terminology and and other PSAs terminology that will certainly be beneficial for new people on boarding so yeah you're absolutely correct agents other people working on resolving tickets they're the technicians and then end users in Halo they're they're your customers they're the the actual people that are raising the tickets so and yeah and according to your so your interface there is showing users which are are effectively end users rather than use that that is correct yeah I think that's where a lot of people you know coming from potentially coming from other PSA tools may get confused because a user could be could be seen as a person using Halo rather than yeah yeah yeah end user so yeah um so just you know for people that that are brand new on on Halo looking to go through the implementation just always remember that you know agents are like we said are your your engineers your technicians whatever you want to call them and users when you see the word user that is referring to the end user or the the customer or the you know the end user that is logging the the ticket with your company yeah that's absolutely correct cool um yeah so let's let's jump into the organization module um where we can go in and configure our organization so um what we have in here three main tabs so firstly we've got our details tab where we can just specify our high level information against the organization itself this will be present on the the footer of the self-service portal so your your email address phone number um head office address will come from these details and below that we have some more sort of miscellaneous information so we've got banking details again we'll come on to this when we start looking at the the billing configuration in more detail and then below that we have our portal config so The Branding and theme of the self-service portal uh what I want to focus on now is actually the organizational chart and I just want to spend a bit of time sort of uh breaking down what we're looking at here so um we see sort of four levels really um right at the top we have the organization itself and then below that we have these free green boxes so these are referred to as departments in Halo um and they are they are effectively containers for agents and teams and we'll see shortly that we can grant an agent membership to a department uh and that can provide them visibility to all tickets within that department so um you know you might have a support manager who needs to see all um all tickets in first and second line for example now within each department we see these Yellow Boxes these are referred to as teams and these are these are the the places where you can actually have tickets assigned so an agent can be a member of a department but that doesn't necessarily grant them the ability to have tickets assigned to them if you want to have tickets assigned to a particular agent they would need to be a member of a team so teams are teams are the sort of containers for the tickets themselves departments are containers for teams and then finally we see these purple boxes here these are the actual agents in the system so each department can have multiple teams and each team can have multiple agents cool okay so um in terms of sort of how do we how do we amend uh this organizational chart for example for example maybe I don't want to have the infrastructure team in here um I might want to add an additional projects team or additional sales team we can do that by clicking edit in the top left um and what's handy just again as a side note was handy throughout Halo is sort of a lot of the the screens almost follow this template like format by which I mean if you want to create a new entity of something the chances are there'll be a new button in the top right if you want to edit something you might find an edit button at the top left and if there is an edit button this is probably where you'll find it so I clicked edit at the top sort of takes me into edit mode within our organizational chart and you might have noticed here that now against all our departments and our teams we have this little plus icon so I might want to go to support and at this point I have the option to add a new team or new members to that department so let's add a new team in that's going to open up the um the new team screen where we fill in the relevant details now you'll see some of these fields are marked for little red asterisks that just denotes that they're mandatory Fields so you don't have to fill everything in and of course the more information you put in the better but for an initial setup if you just want to get the team brought into Halo all you need to do is fill in the the mandatory Fields so let's do um let's just do call it security there's a couple of important points here um firstly when we're creating our teams we have these free check boxes down here used for tickets user projects used for CRM and this will effectively establish whether or not tickets which is your sort of standard instant request type tickets projects which will be projects project tasks Etc or CRM which will be opportunities these options establish whether this team can have tickets of these types assigned to them and again when we start looking at the service desk in more detail we'll see how we actually specify a ticket of a certain type as being a ticket a project or an opportunity so um this is our security team so I might want to say that it can be assigned standard support tickets and projects but they shouldn't be assigned leads or opportunities so I'll uncheck this box and we'll put our working hours in and now this is also another important point and you'll see this throughout the system the ability to mark an entity as inactive so by marking an entity is inactive whether it's a team an agent uh a ticket type an invoicing schedule and if if you mark an entity as inactive it will store that in the database it will keep the the information in the database for you to use at a later point but that information won't be returned in the front end so um an example there is you might have a technician who has left the company you don't necessarily just want to delete him or her you you'll still want records of them of the work that they had done throughout their time at the company but you don't want them to log in you don't want them to take up a license in Halo so you could mark them as inactive so that's quite an important Point don't necessarily delete stuff uh my advice would probably be to mark it as inactive instead another important point that you'll see throughout the system is uh the this sequence option so many of the the entities in Halo whether it's a team whether it's a ticket status whether it's a ticket they appear in lists um and if an entity has a sequence against it and it usually means that you can specify where in the list this entity appears in this case where in the list of teams will this team appear and generally the lower distance number the higher in the list um the the entity is uh I think that's all we we need to be concerned with right now um we'll probably come back to some of these options uh you know on a second run uh once we've got the in the Baseline setup configured and we want to come back and make some further improvements that we'll probably start looking at mailbox overrides message groups Etc and but we'll come back to that at a later date so save that now that's created my team for me and if I click back here we'll see that's added the security team in under the support department um but it has no agents right so we could we could assign a ticket to the security team uh unassigned agent but it's not actually there's no actual people within this team so what we might want to do at this point is Click into the team then go to our agents tab in here at which point I can click edit again and I can add my agents in add me and you go now when we're adding agents into a team see we have a couple of options here um a handy one is whether or not an agent in this team can be assigned tickets in the team so you might want to Grant someone access to tickets within a team but not necessarily give them the ability to be assigned tickets within that team and then below that we also have some options around sort of restricting the tickets within that team that they can see perhaps you have a new starter in first line support and they're getting past tickets from other agents and you only want them to see their own tickets if it's not in their queue their personal cue then they shouldn't see it so that's what those options are so that um that can be assigned to thing I guess would be if you had a um you know a dispatcher or a triage person so you say you know they want to have visibility of of the team um and and the tickets within that team but they typically wouldn't be the person that has tickets assigned to them so but they can still have visibility of of the team and the Agents within the team and the tickets in their team and that kind of thing yeah yeah exactly so they'll be able to assign tickets to other agents that can be assigned within that team but uh yeah them themselves not okay lovely stuff save that and then save that and if we go back we should find that we are now members of the security team now um it's worth sort of highlighting it's it's worth mentioning now about the agents themselves and about how we sort of create our agents the options around the agent configuration in how we set up the permissions and roles so we don't necessarily have to manually come in and add an agent to the respective teams and give them the respective permissions every time you bring a new technician in um but instead set up a template of permissions that you can easily apply to them so together just before you go with that sorry just one thing and I know this is probably going to come up in in questions either people are going to you know put it in the um in the comments below or or it's going to come up at some point in Consulting course but are you able to drag and drop stuff and I know the answer to this I'm just asking you this from um from the the point of view of the of the video but are you able to drag and drop stuff from there like yeah so Emmy are you able to drag him into project management or do you have to click the plus button you have to click the plus button okay uh yeah uh at that point there are there are a few handy places where drag and drop can be utilized we'll see that when we uh look at sort of kanban views um merging tickets you can drag and drop tickets to reassign them but unfortunately in here yeah dragging and dropping is not an option okay cool um so yeah let's let's take a look at our agents so I'm going to follow my breadcrumbs back to the main configuration module and this time instead of going into the organization module I will go into teams and agents so in here we see a few options we see the teams and if I actually click in here we should find our security team and there it is at the top of the list based on that sequence um take a step back we have our roles we'll talk about those in just a moment but for now we'll go into our agents module so um these are these these are all the agents the the technicians that you'll have in the system um clicking into myself again we see a few tabs along the top here so firstly we have our details tab again high level information against the the agent in question their name email address their password whether they've got two-factor authentication enabled uh their role or roles whether or not they're active and whether or not they're an API agent effectively meaning that they they can't log in um but would have access to the API so this is this is Handy for for Integrations again probably something that we'll come back to and again just some more information below the the name their number um their their charge rate which we'll have a look at when we come onto the billing um and we also have this departments and teams tab against the agent and this is where we actually see instead of going into uh our organizational chart I'm looking at it that way we could instead go into a particular agent and we'll see in here all of the teams that they are a member of and the level of access that they have to those teams and Below those departments also so we'll see um we'll see throughout this video series that with Halo there's definitely more than one way to skin a cat um you can get to areas of configuration from different ways you can interact with entities in different ways and this is just one example of that so um it's it's a matter of personal preference I suppose go to the organizational chart or you could go to the the agent themselves now a very important uh sort of a very important tab against the agent record here is the permissions Tab and this is where we actually specify the level of access that an agent has to the platform um so there's quite a few in here I'm not going to go through all of them but I'll cover I'll cover them at a high level um so let's just collapse a couple of these and first and foremost we have our general permissions and right at the top there is this uh R is this agent a Halo PSA administrator Halo PSA administrators are people who can interact or people who can access all of the configuration options um and uh will have uh potentially full access to the system because if they don't have access to something they'll be able to come into configuration and make those changes um now we'll we'll take a look at these other features um in a moment and but but for now I think we'll we'll uh wrap this piece up and then um come back and continue with the the agent permissions excellent um that's a that's a really good place to to kind of end us so um in in the next video um we're we're gonna um yeah go through the um the roles will cover off a little bit more about what permissions are um so uh yeah keep keep watching and uh and we'll see in the next video thank you very much uh Morgan really appreciate your time and we'll uh we'll see on the next one awesome thanks for having me thanks cheers