The Lean MSP: DevOps and Automation
BY IT GLUE | March 06, 2018
We spend a lot of time talking about lean philosophy because it has proven to be the most reliable path to prosperity for MSPs. Conceptualizing your lean strategy requires seeing where the biggest opportunities to cut waste are in your organization. One of the most important trends right now is the move to DevOps and automation. If done right, the potential for time savings is phenomenal.
DevOps + Lean
DevOps fits well with lean philosophy because of its emphasis on building automation to make tasks easier. Automating routine tasks is a major labor-saver, which is why we incorporate as much automation as we can into IT Glue.
To facilitate this level of automation, a lot of MSPs have added DevOps talent to their team, to write PowerShell scripts, for example. For larger companies, this is a full-time role, but for smaller companies, this might be a senior tech, or even a junior tech with a bright future. In most cases, adding DevOps talent at some level leads to substantial time savings, and almost always pays for itself. And there are huge gains to be made early on, too, when there are dozens of routine processes in need of automation.
Connect all the Apps, all the Things
The beautiful thing about the DevOps approach is that your business can connect just about any app and just about any device. If you ever want information from A to go to B, then this is a process that can be automated. Different devices talk to different apps, different apps talk with each other, and so on. The power of DevOps is something that can be leveraged in all aspects of your business, too. We’ve used this approach to streamline processes in accounting, in marketing and in sales to get different apps in our stack to talk to each other, with significant cost savings.
Connecting IT Glue
IT Glue provides its API as part of the Enterprise plan, to help you gain additional value by way of documentation automation. We also are continuing to build out integrations to make automated documenting more accessible to more MSPs.
Our partners have also proven to be an incredible resource for documentation automation, and this is going to be one of our big pushes this year. GCITS in Gold Coast, Australia published a blog post detailing a script they wrote to sync Office 365 tenant info into IT Glue, and our partner base loved it.
We have also started a GitHub repo to provide further scripts that will help automate different aspects of your business. Have you written any scripts to improve your documentation automation? If so, let us know!
The best part is that we are just getting started. DevOps and automation are one of the leading trends for MSPs coming into 2018, and this is going to be a big push not just for IT Glue, but for all MSPs in general. By reducing the marginal cost of frequently repeated processes, you’ll not only be a leaner MSP but a more profitable one as well.
IT Glue’s documentation platform for MSPs leads the way in documentation automation. Packed with integrations, API access, and an intuitive documentation structure, IT Glue is built not just to get you documenting, but to leverage that documentation to lower your costs and increase your profitability. Guided by the principles of lean philosophy, IT Glue’s commitment to documentation automation will help you run a much more efficient and profitable MSP.
