What Documentation Should you Store in IT Glue?
BY IT GLUE | March 02, 2021
When you’re trying to optimize your IT Glue™ experience, you might be wondering what documents you should store in IT Glue. The short answer is all of them, but of course it’s never quite that simple. So we’ve put together a handy primer to help you prioritize what you’ll document.
Focus on value
To help you determine what to document first, you have to answer the question of what IT Glue’s most significant value is to your organization. In our experience, partners gain the most ROI from two things: automated documentation, and documenting routine information. The reason these are the most valuable is simple – this is the information that your team will be using on a daily basis. The value of having something documented is exponential when accessing that documentation becomes part of a repeatable, time-saving process.
Automated documentation comes first
So start with the information that you can automate. First sync your PSA, and ensure that data is tidy. You should clean the data (culling obsolete records, etc.) in your PSA before syncing to IT Glue. If you have two-way sync, you can edit records in IT Glue, but it is recommended that deletions are done in the PSA. It’s just easier than way. Plus, you avoid syncing clutter into IT Glue.
Then sync your RMM. Add in Datto, Auvik, ScalePad and any other third party apps.
If you have information stored elsewhere, you might want to consider leveraging our API to build an integration. This is especially powerful for flexible assets, where you’ve customized your assets to align with your unique operational needs.
Documenting SOPs and KBs
Once you’ve got your client environments documented, the next step is to document your SOPs, and build up a Knowledge Base to help your team.
The big thing to remember is that you’re not aiming to document as much as humanly possible; you’re aiming to save as much time as humanly possible.
Focus first on the most common tasks. Think about it this way. Suppose it takes a five minutes to write an SOP, or import it from Word. That’s your investment. The return is the time savings your team will gain from having that SOP at their fingertips. If there’s a routine task that you cut shave 30 seconds off, and this time saving will occur ten times per day, documenting that SOP will pay for itself in the first day. By contrast, it might take a month for documenting a non-routine task to pay for itself. So start with the most common, routine tasks first.
Add network documentation
By using Network Glue, you’ll be able to discover and document client networks. In addition to that, Network Glue will produce network diagrams for your clients, and keep them up-to-date. You can also use our integration with Auvik, or input diagrams drawn in LucidChart, if those methods are preferred.
Document complex tasks to reduce errors
Next, document the most complex tasks. These might not be the most common, but there can be tremendous time savings gained when complicated tasks are documented, not just through the elimination of time waste but the reduction of errors as well. You might experience an 80 or 90% time savings on some of the more complex tasks (e.g. a server build from taking it out of the box to installing client software).
Work your way down from there until you’re around 80% documented or so. At that point, it might not pay off to document the most obscure things, especially for tasks seldom done that also change a lot.
Take advantage of the automation tools provided, even for SOPs. Word docs and .zip files, LucidChart diagrams and more can be embedded into IT Glue, so that you don’t need to re-create them.
Additional Resources
For some other thoughts, take a look at some of the great articles we’ve published to help you document better:
Writing Great Process Documentation
How IT Glue does Procedural Documentation
IT Glue is an information management platform that allows for efficient storage and retrieval of all the documentation you need to help your MSP run better. By integrating PSA and RMM data, we can help increase your efficiency, and reduce onboarding times by even more. By eliminating wasted time from your business, IT Glue gives you more time to focus on what matters – growing your business.