Part 3 – Culture of Process

Type, Subtype, & Item (TSI) are powerful tools in ConnectWise Manage (CWM). When tickets are coded with these three items, three positive things become possible. In our first blog (read it here), we discussed how we can use it in reporting. For our second blog, we covered my favorite topic of why we link TSI to your technical Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs). In this article, we’ll go over how we build out our list of Types, SubTypes, & Items.

Many before you have struggled with how to categorize their TSI, and by far, the best advice I can give on the matter, is to start small, start somewhere, and let your technicians guide you.

As for starting somewhere and starting small, you are going to have a pick a few categories to get your team in right mind set. This is completely up to you but some great examples for Type are Application and Hardware. The application type would have subtypes such as Adobe and Microsoft Office, while the Hardware type could hold Server, PC, and Printer.

The key is how you grow from here. I always recommend creating a Type similar to “zNew Type Needed”, and similarly a SubType of “zNew SubType Needed”, as well as a final “zNew SOP Created” and/or “zNew SOP Needed”.  The “z” just helps me push this item to the bottom of the list of options. When these options are used, you can even have another template fire (or use Standard Notes, but that’s another topic), prompting your technicians to give you suggestions as to what they should be called. Obviously, it can get a bit more detailed as your technicians start creating SOPs, or requesting ones, as you go.

Using the above technician-participating process, you’d be amazed at how quickly your TSI “tree” takes shape, and how easily your technicians, current and future, can find SOPs to help them resolve problems more quickly and consistently.

There is a bit of work here for your CWM administrator or manager as they will periodically need to look at a view (or report) of these requests for new Types and Subtypes. They then need to add the new item, as well as create the template and cause these two things to update the ticket automatically.

If you need help setting any of this up, of have any questions or thoughts, contact us.

Allen Edwards is president of Eureka Process, a firm specializing in process and leadership for IT firms. He started in IT professionally in 1994 and has been in management since 1999. He started his own MSP in 2002 and sold it in 2011. Subsequently, he went on to grow and bring a culture of process to two other MSPs before founding Eureka Process to bring his skills and experience to IT firms like yours.