Transcript
Today, we have a few people on that are going to help talk a little bit about automation. So things that you can automate as an IT leader, things that will help you kind of alleviate some of the stress and things that you have to take care of. And then also some of those things that you could automate as an IT leader. So that includes not just tech, but also the people side of everything. So welcome in everyone. And if you are new to the IT Leadership Lab, welcome in. This is a community dedicated to IT leaders. It's a place for you to share content, learn from your peers, build community, things like that. And then we also host bi-monthly webinars, just like this, to discuss various IT leadership topics. And then we bring on leaders within the space that can share their expertise. Because personally, I'm not an IT leader, so I am far from an expert in any of this. So I bring some folks on that are able to kind of share their experience and talk a little bit about these topics. So today, I figured we'd take a break from a lot of the people-focused topics and talk a little bit about automation. Because there are a lot of things in automation that can help make an IT leader's life easier. And it's kind of one of those things that will unlock your organization and workflow as soon as you can kind of master it. So I'm gonna go around and have all the speakers introduce themselves. So if you want to just introduce yourself, your job title, and how long you've been in IT, and what that journey has looked like. And we have a new face on today, so I'll kind of let him go first. James, if you want to introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your journey in IT. Oh, sure. So I'm James Petty, the IT Director at TextureQuest down here in Southeast Tennessee. I've been in IT now since 2012, so what is that, 14 years? And yeah, so I started out as a junior admin, didn't know up from down, left from right, and so now I'm the IT Director here. And automation has definitely helped accelerate that a lot. Yeah, awesome. Well, thank you for being here and thanks for being on. Abhi, you wanna introduce yourself next? Hey, everybody. My name's Abhi Saini. I'm the Founder and CEO of Barium Networks. We're an MSP here in Orlando, Florida. I've been in IT for way too long now. I started out as an intern for the sysadmin at my middle school in seventh grade. I was installing, fixing, and upgrading teachers' computers and the computers in the lab. Not sure why he wasn't doing the tickets, but hey, I learned a couple of things. And I've been doing it ever since. So it's been a couple of decades since then. And recently I started my company and that's been kind of the bread and butter of my life now. Well, besides my daughter. She turned seven months, a couple of days ago. Yeah. Yeah. So a really good busy time in your life where you started a new business and you have a daughter and yeah, a lot of stuff going on. But all good things. Trevor, do you want to go ahead and introduce yourself? Yeah. Hi, everyone. I'm Trevor Stewart. I'm an IT Manager for the City of Lakesville in Minnesota. I've been working here for 20 years. Previously to that, I did some other IT work, started a small business with some friends, set up a computer booth. Kind of just a few different things to keep people playing games and happy. And that was well over 20 years ago now, from being an age. My career has progressed all the way, very similar to James. I kind of went from the bottom to the top with the same company. And it's been a wild ride getting through the changes. Awesome. Just a heads up, you're a little bit muffled. I'm not sure if something happened, which sucks because we already got the audio machine figured out, but hopefully it all works. But thank you for being on. I appreciate it. All right. So we'll start off talking about automation in general. What types of IT workflows work best and they're best candidates for automation and give the most efficiency gains when automated. So patching, onboarding, monitoring tickets, things like that. What are some of those basics that people should invest in that have the greatest return? Yeah, I mean, so I can start there. You know, there's this, if you guys are all familiar with the 80-20 rule, right? That 20% of your time or your efforts return 80% of your money or your life or whatever, right? Like it's worth 80% of your investment there. It kind of same thing applies to figuring out what kind of things in your IT system that you need to automate. So I like to say like if a particular task takes 20% of your technicians weekly time, which is a lot, but if they're working on something just a couple hours a day, every single day, that adds up to 20% of their week. That's a ideal candidate for something that can be automated. You know, before we got something like Ninja, it was a lot of making sure that devices had the right amount of storage space, you know, clearing your recycle bin, your downloads folder, this and that, just maintaining the computers themselves. And that's kind of one of the lowest hanging fruit. It's just making sure that your users can use their computers to the fullest effect and you're not hitting 90, 95, 97. Oh my God, now it's 99%. And fun fact, if you do hit 99% on your hard drive usage, Ninja stops working and as well as everything else. So you can't really help the user at that point. Yeah, I think a lot of it also kind of depends on the size of the company. Like one of the companies that I worked for, super small, would hire one or two people a year. Is that worth the effort of writing a automation pipeline to create a new user? AD account, 365, Google, whatever, for two users a year, or was it more important for us to automate our release pipeline? So that's where we decided that that's where the time was worth it for us. But in a previous job, when I worked for the government, user onboarding was a really high priority because we were onboarding hundreds of people every week. So it did become a priority at that point. But a lot of it's kind of perspective, like how big is your company? How fast are you growing? And we only have so many resources, so where should those resources be dedicated to? Resources being IT professionals. You know, I thought the most difficult part about automation was deciding what we should automate. And James really pointed it out. You know, a lot of times it's automating the things that you're going to be doing the most often. In my world, when we started, every year we have to deploy new computers and go through that process. That became one of the most obvious things for us to automate. We took the products that we already had going through Ninja's RMM software, in our case, and we started doing our VPN installs. We started doing our software installs. We put as much stuff as possible into a single location. And then when we finally went back and thought, how can we automate this? How can we take some of the manual out of this process? It became fairly obvious. Since then, I've been encouraging my techs, as they're going through their day, to try to just write down some of the stuff that they're doing that's taking time, just to get it jotted down outside of just the ticket workflow, so they can look back and think, you know what? I really did spend a lot of time on this today. So they don't necessarily look at their own ticket churn the way I do. Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. So it sounds like it really just depends on your business and what it needs to focus on to kind of decide what to automate. And then... Oh, sorry, go ahead. Another way to think about that, too, is if you're doing something a lot, like onboarding a lot of users or deploying a lot of machines, you usually want every single one of those to go the same way. So automation can help keep the consistency of every single interaction the same. That way you're not missing a box on a checklist or something's typoed here and there. By doing it one time in the automation and using that to make the rest of your systems work seamlessly, you keep everything the same. Yeah, I think that's the beauty of automation, is not only is it saving the time, which is the ultimate goal, but it's the repeatability factor. Like, I push a button and it's gonna work the exact same thing, same way every single time. Is that when I was deploying servers and we had a 30-page PDF, there was 10,000 checkboxes that we had to check. Of course, we're going to miss one sometimes. And then six months from now, this weird little nuance that's causing this application to run slow. And so it's the repeatability of it. Honestly, I'd recommend taking just about everything you do and looking at it through an automation works, like a workflow, see how long you think it would take you to automate that single task you're working on right now. Had one of our guys that had to go get config files and pull them off of the computer. And it just wasn't something that happened very often. So he never really thought about automating it. But since it's just a config file that's clear text on a computer, we realized how much time he could actually save just by having it always there and available for him. So we created an automation just to go read the text back, store in the variable for us, so that when he does finally need that again, the information is readily available. The script itself took minutes to write, probably less time than it would for him to get his hands on the computer and run it. Yeah. The opposite is true too. If you have something you need to deploy to a computer manually for whatever reason, why copy it to every single computer when you need to do it, just send that item as long as it's not something for like secure information or whatnot, but just deploy it to every single computer. So that way when you do need to use it, it's right there in your working directory for your IT system. Yeah. And how do you decide, with all of these tasks that you could potentially automate, how do you decide what should be automated and what should continue to be human driven? You manually do these processes. Is it just the amount of time? Is it just the number of times that you're having to do this workflow? Or is there more that goes into that decision? For me, it's a lot of deciding how much of it is going to have to change every single time. One of the things that's been hit on pretty heavily is making sure that you're consistent and it's always exactly the same deployment. Well, if you don't have a scriptable way to make it a consistent deployment, sometimes it's going to be stuck with a manual interaction. So in our case, if it's going to require us to do something every single time, and we can't especially front load the process, maybe giving it a computer name ahead of time or setting some variables ahead of time, then it tends to get stuck in the back in terms of priority to automate. And another thing is like when... One of the biggest things that we've tried to automate is our security systems. For a lot of cybersecurity incidents, it's usually something mundane. Like back when you had just a plain old antivirus, that's relatively automated, right? It's constantly scanning your system. It finds something, it blocks it. Great. You don't have to be like... It doesn't just say, hey, I found something. What do you want to do? On the security side, there's a lot of things that are going to be similar in that vein where it's very simple. You already know what the action is going to be when you find that incident or that artifact. But then there's going to be a lot of things where it's like, huh, let's dive into this a little bit more nuanced, maybe we block the system first or we isolate it somehow, and then we're going to do something additional to it to investigate the findings. But that difference between what you can really say is we know exactly what we're going to do and what requires a little bit more nuance is the dividing line between automation and human process. Yeah, I think you also need to take a look at what is the process you're trying to automate, break that down into bite-sized pieces and try to figure out what pieces are reusable. So let's take a user onboarding, for instance. I have to create a user. Creating a user in AD is the exact same process as creating a service account. So that's a reusable process. So creating the automation so that these individual bits and pieces can be reusable elsewhere and writing them as such can also eventually help speed up that development time. Yeah, and make an important... Oh, sorry. I was going to say, I think an important thing to keep track of with automation as well is making sure that you have some kind of log if it does go wrong and you start talking about things like security. I like the hard drive, the fullness example. One of our automations kicks off at about an 80% hard drive full and that's, you know, we're going to run as many scripts as we can to just alleviate the issue. But then by about 92% hard drive full, that's when we start to go hands-on for it because obviously the automations aren't working. So having that fallback in case the script or something similar does fail is an important part of this process as well. Yeah. Abhi, were you going to say something? Oh, no. For what James said, when you are making those automation, those little seg pieces that you can reuse, right? Essentially little modules or whatever objects. Remember, that's actually a good thing because just two days ago, I created an automation in our PSA and I named all the variables very specific. And then I realized I could reuse them for three, four other different forms that we were building out. And I'm like, all right, well, I named this one Microsoft Teams and now I'm using for Exchange and SharePoint. and OneDrive and I should have just named it without the, to make it easier for you to understand what it is. Now, every time I'm using it, I'm like, why does this say MS Teams? So make it easy for you to not just reuse it, but then understand what you're doing when you deploy the automation and then you forget to check on it after six months so that you go back to it and you don't be like, what did I do? That documentation in the variable itself kind of helps. Yeah, Max also said we find visualizing automations first before we do them works best, which I definitely think that as someone that likes lists and likes laying everything out, I think that definitely helps to y'all kind of do the same whenever you're setting up automations. Yeah, absolutely not. It depends on the size of the automation. Yeah, I'm the bad person. I dive in head first and then I kind of figure it out and go, it's a very bad habit. Don't do that. Although I will say, with AI, it's really kind of fun to visualize it with a chatbot to think about how you can automate something. You can't rely on it heavily, but you're like, I know what I need to do and I have all these parts and pieces. Just start talking to the AI. It kind of gets your brain rolling and thinking about different ways that you can do things. And then you can be like, oh, okay, I missed that idea. That's a terrible idea. Let me do it this different way. So for me, that works a little bit more visual. I've never been like a really visualizing kind of person to begin with. Max just mentioned Lucidchart and I'll second that one. I've used that one for these types of things. If the automation is very long and has a good chance it's gonna impact people or have a lot of failures, I'll definitely get some stuff and write it out, put it out on a whiteboard and stuff. Building ones that are more simple automations just to do a repetitive task. I tend to just skip that step. And this is a question that Julius has about automation and obviously as an MSP owner, this might be a little more relevant to you, but I will also say that IT manages a bunch of different kinds of employees. So Julius asked, we have medical practices, financial services, retail and small mom and pop businesses. They all have standard elements in common, but then they need different software and restrictions. Do you just keep adding the ninja and hope you can find what you need? Yeah, I can take that from the MSP perspective. And before I had the MSP, I worked internal for 15 years. So I kind of have a good idea of both ideas. And then honestly, they're the same. You have IT working with departments or you have IT working with organizations, with sub-departments or whatever. But I mean, the idea, the hierarchy is very similar in terms of how you can do things. So what we end up doing is we have separate ninja policies based on each individual client. The parent policy is gonna be our default policy that we deploy to all of our clients, but we customize each one for every single client based on what they need. The benefit too is that if we want them to do certain things with the Ninja One SysTray icon, we can customize that SysTray icon per client. So we have one client that they wanted easy access to some of their CRM and ERP tools, but we can be like, okay, well, yeah, we can just add a link to your SysTray and it's not gonna affect the rest of our clients. It does add a little bit more management and it does get a little bit too annoying if you have way too many clients, but you can have it in a way that everything kind of trickles down from the top. You make your major changes in your parent, then there's subsets below that. But that works really well in terms of keeping individualized, customized automations for each sub-department or client separate and unique. And if you have different onboardings and you'd have different forms where they wanna select different things, again, you can have, we use Halo PSA and I'm sure other PSAs do this well similarly and other tools out there. But when we create a form for them to submit an onboarding, we have field groups. Some of the field groups, very generic. What's the new employee's name? What's their start date? Things like that. We can put that in every single form, but then we can have a specific form for a specific client if they need something in there. And the cool thing about, at least with Halo, I don't know if it works with other PSAs, is that I can just simply have the visibility rule for that field group, that grouping of things to be visible only to that client. So I can have a single form with visibility groups for every single client. The client ends up only seeing what is relevant to them and not everything. So it's a pretty lengthy form and I could split it out into multiple, but for work's role for us is to have one single form we manage and then it just shows the client exactly what is pertinent to them. And then when they submit it, we have all the information we need for that specific client. I think leaning into Julius's example, Avi does really try to hit home and it's very important that you set up the top-down policies in whatever program you're running. If you can simplify that process, that in itself is automation. You're automatically setting up certain aspects of that computer the way you want it. And the more granular you can get at the bottom, the easier it'll be for you to make things repetitive. Then when you have stuff that crosses back over, you can still use your tool and no matter how you want to deploy it, because I'm kind of brainstorming this as I'm talking, but using stuff like custom fields to have specific software installs using something like Adobe. Adobe Acrobat's probably available across multiple different policies, different companies, but not to everybody. So you put in a custom field for install Adobe for certain computers, and then you check the box when you're going through the deployment and it'll just go through and get deployed. And that would be available to all of the companies opposed to some of the more medical software would only be pushed out to the medical company. Same thing for the financial company. That's one way if you go back out of the policy level to automate those processes and finding what your tool's capable of doing is where you're going to find your sweet spot for getting it done. And I think one of the ways that you can do that Trevor is if you make sure the tools you're using can all talk to each other, you can synchronize groups between them. So we focus on making sure all of our security groups in Entra are the same across all of our clients. And when we want to do something, we kind of assign it to a specific security group. There's going to be unique ones in there, but for the most part, they're very similar. Those security groups get synchronized with our PSA. They then get like synchronized with Ninja to determine certain custom fields. And all that data gets fed into the one platform that we focus in on understanding, or setting up those automations. We also use Immibot to do some software deployments and that takes in those security groups and we can assign software to a security group. So by having that top-down effect, you're allowing yourself to consistently do the same thing. You can have a single one. When you onboard a new client, a new department, a new whatever, you can just simply assign that automation, that software installation, that configuration, whatever it is to that group. And then it automatically gets affected by everyone under that. Yeah. Yeah, I also wanted to talk a little bit about what skills are kind of really, really necessary when you're starting to work on automating things. Because a lot of you are writing scripts and things like that. What are some skills that you have had to refine in order to be able to work on scripts like this and work on automation? It's really just two things. Having an open mind and having ADD. And like focusing on something very specific and just being like that, I'm working on just that. I think it's important. Go ahead, Ken. Oh, I know for me, specifically, I had to learn how to use the YAML because just about every automation tool out there has some aspect of YAML. Makes my head hurt, makes my brain, eyes bleed. But that was just one example. The really is you got to be okay with learning new technologies. Because however you're going to automate your process, it's going to be something new. You're going to have a platform. You're not always going to have that same platform. Probably every three to five years, you're going to change because someone's going to come and offer you a better deal. Hopefully not. So hopefully your automations are modular enough so they can survive a transition from platform A to platform B. So just that you're going to have to make sure you know. You don't have to know everything. You have to be willing to learn new things. Mm-hmm, yeah. Getting your foot in the door and starting to learn, I think was the hardest part for me. And Avi said, he has to be creative and have ADD. And it was actually the creativity part that was more difficult for me in trying to decide what things are going to be worth it and then just stepping into it. And I know we've all had talks on AI. And if you understand the risks of bringing in AI code, it is nice to be able to go and reference things like script databases, libraries, and then maybe tone them up a little bit with some of the AI code. Just to share something a little outside of my realm, I just have a friend who's not necessarily technical, but he does understand technology, create an automation in his own home so when his Plex server fails, he gets a message on Discord and the lights in his house change color. And he was able to do that largely with stuff that he learned from AI tools and just available on the internet to solve his problem. Well, if this guy in marketing can do it, then it's probably something that we can figure out too in our tech worlds. Yeah. And if you don't know YAML or you don't know PowerShell or Python or whatever language you decide is necessary for your automation, you should at least have your Python 101 level of understanding. And code in general, you should be able to read it to an extent that you can kind of see what it's doing. So at that point, when you have AI create a script for you, you can take it, dissect it, understand it and make sure it's not doing something stupid. Right, and that's the benefit of using a tool to kind of get you past the hurdle that you are unable to jump over. Yeah, it's also important that you understand the process from end to end in as much detail as you can possibly fathom. Because you cannot automate a process you do not fully understand. Yeah. So if someone from finance says, I need help automating this process to do this thing so that the spreadsheets work at the end of the month. If you don't understand that completely 100%, chances of that working are gonna be very slim. Yeah, are there any specific, like when y'all were starting out, were there any specific languages or things that you found to be most helpful whenever you were just kind of getting started out with scripting and things like that? When we were starting out, those languages are probably dead. Okay. My first programming language was Pascal. I guess for recent years. I do everything in PowerShell. Yeah, I would agree with that, PowerShell. Now, obviously like PowerShell is useless to you, Brittany, being a fruit. Hey, shh, I'm not allowed to talk about my... PowerShell is cross-platform. It does work. That's true. Okay, that's fair. It does take some effort there. But like the ideas for PowerShell, you can take those and you can adapt it into Python or you can adapt it into another type of script. I find bash scripting very useful as well because that works across every platform inherently. But these are all kind of iterations of each other, right? Like we started with batch and we started with bash and then we started working with PowerShell and maybe Python kind of elevating ourselves in the power of what our scripts can do. But that fundamental language, everything is based on or like started our careers essentially is really important to understand. I think it's important to start with the language you can use. If we sit here and say, and Brittany is being the perfect example as our use case here, but we say learn PowerShell but Brittany's group supports 90% Macintosh computers and 10% Linux computers. Well, PowerShell is probably not the best thing for her to learn. So you go and you find a language that's going to work amongst the majority of what you support so that you can use it so that you can further your knowledge of it. And then just save that first script you write so you can laugh at yourself a year later when you go back and you look at all the mistakes you made and how unclean the code was and how you had no remarks. It worked, I guess. But it worked. Awesome, well. Well, what are some best practices for automating legacy systems? So if you have something that they won't get rid of, is it still worth automating if it's something that needs to stay? I mean, I kind of did something like this at my last job. We had a pretty, it wasn't really a legacy system, but it was a legacy piece of software that the vendor was eventually going to sunset. And we were still using it and you were allowed to still use it until you decide not to renew your contract or whatever. We didn't necessarily automate the platform itself or like our settings and our configurations in it every time we do certain things, but we kind of tried to do a pen and paper automation, create checklists for certain things and tests for certain things. So that way, if you can't directly implement something to affect that legacy system, you still have a way of making sure everything you're doing is consistent. And it's still a very much manual process, but you're, in my opinion, like you're automating the think. You're now, you know, you've done a lot of work to make sure you do it the right way, stop thinking and just do it. And then you be making a repeatable process. So that way you can have other people that may not have those same skills, be able to take that checklist and do the job. Mm hmm. Yeah, I that was actually another question I wanted to ask, are there any ways that people can automate without, you know, without needing to script or needing to, like, do that side of it? Are there templates that people could put into place? Are there are the things that you do that are automation that are technically, you know, automation as we think about it? Yeah. There's tons of GUI based automation, and I assume just about every RMM tool have access to some kind of it. A lot of what we run for our disk cleanup was freely available through Ninja's template library, because that's what we use. We were able to run automations based on a condition that says, if the hard drive's too full, run the disk cleanup utility, empty the recycle bin, delete out the temp folders. In our case, we transitioned from SCCM, so we always have it run one more check to make sure we don't have latent SCCM packages sitting around that shouldn't be there anymore. All of that stuff was largely available without us having to write a line of code. It was all just GUI based. It could also be even similar to that. So, like, we used JIRA for our ticketing system, and we wanted our tickets to look a specific way. So, we created a template that says, if you create this kind of ticket, it automatically puts this table in there and automatically put some of these fields in there, you know, in the text box for you to answer. So, it doesn't have to be code. It can just be as simple as putting a table and a ticket. And even completely removing yourself from the technical anything, I'd say for your average, you know, tech-illiterate user, there's plenty of automations you can put into Outlook or Gmail, right? Every time you get a specific type of email from a specific person, you know, create a filter or rule to tag that with a certain label or put it into a certain folder. I, you know, as the owner of an MSP, I get a lot of bills from all of our vendors. The easiest way for me to keep track of them is I have a filter for every single vendor we work with. And every time I get an email, it tags it with, you know, invoice or, like, NinjaOne slash invoice. I'm like, great, I know where all of my NinjaOne invoices are or all of my Pax8 invoices are or all of my Microsoft or whatever it is. I don't have the automation do anything because I still have to pay the bill or, like, make sure. But technically, autopay is an automation, right? Like, these are kind of where we're kind of loosely using the word automation here. But these are things that your everyday person can still do and kind of get a little bit more freedom back in their life, a little bit more time back in their day to just make it easier for them to sort things out. Yeah, I mean, I think there's a lot of automation that is, it goes beyond what IT typically thinks of as automation. Like you said, setting up filters in your inbox so that they go to different, they're tagged in different ways or go to specific folders and automating, like, recurring calendar invites and just, like, things like that to just make things a little bit easier that don't necessarily have any kind of coding basis. Also, remember who your audience is. An automated process for me is a lot different than an automated process for my accountant. And one thing you said, you asked earlier is, like, how do you decide what to make an automation out of? You know, we being in IT, we see things from a very technical lens or a very high level lens. But, you know, when you think about, like, telling people about safe passwords or, like, security awareness training, something that for us is just second nature, hopefully, for the average person might not be worth anything. We keep thinking, why do I have to keep telling these people about, don't click on a link? It's like, because that's, it's still a big thing to them. It might be really small for us, something that we know every day because it's our industry, but that really small thing down there. And so you have to see how people are doing their job. I like to, I like to have a really good relationship with our users. I'll observe how they do their job and I'll try to figure out, like, I'll notice, like, hey, you're doing the same thing six times. Or did you just really get an email with a spreadsheet attached to it, open it up, copy the data into another spreadsheet and then close them all, like save and close? That's, that's the whole task. What if you don't have to do that? Right, like, what if we can just simply make it easy? And one thing that you have to be careful with is making sure people understand that you're not trying to automate their job away. You're trying to take away the boring stuff so that way they can work on something a bit more interesting. They have, maybe they're, they're overloaded, right? If you're, if you're working 50 hour weeks, what if I can automate 10 hours of your week and you get back down to a proper full time schedule? Right, like things like that might be the areas that you can, you can find with your, your general users to help them improve their job efficiency. Yeah, Patrick brought up that point. Workplace productivity automation is a large area that many companies need help in. Most IT is busy just keeping the lights on, but having the ability to impact productivity for other departments is widely untapped. And yeah, yeah, I definitely think everybody kind of agrees on on that point, for sure. And yes, Benjamin, this will be recorded and then I'll be posting a wrap up of this webinar and kind of those key takeaways today. So you'll definitely have access to it. And then if you came here from the Ninja Discord, I usually pop the recording in there too. So you should, you should have access to it. But yes, so if we look beyond technology and those kinds of automations, how as IT leaders are you using automation to help with any of those non-technical processes, whether it is, you know, setting up one-on-ones or having budgeting meetings and just things like that, that are less tech side and more management side. Are there kind of any automations that are you, that you're using? Yeah, before we jump right into purely management side, what about something right in the middle? Like, you know, IT typically manages the assets for the organization, but who actually typically needs the information on the assets? It's usually finance or logistic or something, right? So we automate the, you know, we pull the serial numbers from our managed devices. We pull the user assigned to them, all this data, warranty information. Thank you, Ninja. Also, thank you SIP at the same time, CyberDrain. So, you know, we pull that information, we put it into our system as the source of truth now, and then we pull reports on that for finance. So that way they can use it for their tracking on, you know, okay, we have 50 computers that are running out of warranty in six months or two years. You know, we should probably think about budgeting for that expense to replace them or upgrade them or whatever it might be. So that's how like your IT systems can help other people and other departments that aren't in the IT realm. Your example is how I was able to make a 10 year budget plan. The finance department wants to, and they do recognize that it's not going to be super accurate 10 years out. So they're grateful for that. But using those levels of automations with an asset management tool and then creating reports that they can dump out. And in my case, it all loads onto a web portal. So I can just give them the web link that says, they're like, what needs to be replaced? What needs to be replaced next year? How much do you plan to spend in three years? Just send them to the little portal and say, punch in whichever year you'd like over here on the side. And it'll predict what we're going to spend based on what we currently have. Now, the thing I haven't added in is growth. That probably would be something if I could figure out that would be good. Using our past growth and saying, well, you guys like to add so and so many assets a year. But for now, it's been a great addition. And HR's automations are also helpful. I'm sure you guys have experienced getting those notices about your employees' anniversaries. The new employee needing their six month review. Setting it up so that if you do weekly, monthly, quarterly check-ins with your employees to check on their health, those are all good examples of automations that could be something as simple as a recurring calendar event to just make your life easier and your brain a little less overwhelmed. Yeah, there's a big reason HR IT SaaS platforms are doing that. They're offering IT services on top of HR products. It's because the two are very closely related when it comes to resource management. And so if you can step ahead of that and start to build your own automations and connect with your HR department, connect with your finance department, and unify the essential cost centers of any business and make it so that way you're actually a driving force for growth and for profit, then you're going to be more valuable to your C-levels, more valuable to the rest of the organization. And it comes with the benefit of befriending HR, which seems to always be a difficult thing for IT to do. But the classic one is always, HR didn't tell us that you're hiring someone. It's like, well, unless you have a process in place and an SOP of some kind, you're never going to get noticed. But what if AD was integrated into the HR system? Or what if every time you were aware of job offers going out and you can then predict when someone's going to be hired or that job offer that's attached to that new person has a start date in the HR system, you can pull that information through whatever API and then make sure that you're aware of the next start date. You don't have to rely on the human to remember to tell you because HR's job is very similar to ours. It's siloed in a way. We do our job very, very well. They do their job very well as well. And by connecting the two platforms to work in the back end, you can make sure both departments are aware of the same situation. Yeah, that's that's a great point. I think Max also kind of was going along the same lines. HR automations, collecting info for new staff, ordering clothes, onboarding packs, things like that. Definitely really helpful to get that information ahead of time. And if there's a start date within, you know, a month or something, you can even automate that. So it starts it kicks off a process where you don't there's nothing that you have to do to interact with the other teams. It just kind of all flows automatically. It's also going to like usually the first interaction that a new employee is going to have with the company is with the IT department, getting their computer set up, whether it be remotely or in person. So if that person doesn't know what didn't know they were coming, the email is not set up. They don't have your access, whatever it is. You've automatically put a bad taste in their mouth for IT and there'll be less likely to come to you for for future problems because they don't know what they're doing. Mm hmm. Yeah, I had a I had a friend started a job recently and he got through was hired at his first day schedule to got there and. Yeah, I had a, I had a friend started a job recently and he got through was hired at his first day schedule to got there, and there's no one there and he didn't even have a laptop yet, so he was just sitting there like, well, I can't really. And so it's like, yeah, it did leave a bad taste in his mouth because he was like, well, I need to like I'm now expected to get my job done but I can't because I don't have a computer and yeah there's like all of that confusion and stuff. um, yeah so as far as using using automations to forecast staffing needs or project planning. Do you use anything as far as automations for future planning. I try, I hire our hiring is so sporadic that it's like it's, you can't chart it. But that's just I think that's just a thing. Yeah, we deal with a lot of cyclical companies like seasonalities, and so like the future is just a mess. At least with the data. Yeah. I wish I could fill in that gap. A very similar boat, unfortunately. To be fair, if we do solve that question right or that dilemma, we can probably take over the big three accounting firms. So, we all need to start brainstorming some ways to take over. I have a random question just to see if Bobby or James has an idea on it or if anybody in chat does. So one of the things that I feel almost bad about is my inability to get people who are non technical to start thinking in an automation mindset. And HR is a good example, the HR automations collecting info for staff. When you have HR who's been around for 20 years, the way they've always done stuff is the way they're likely to keep doing stuff. So how do you guys, similar to maybe a security training program, encourage and teach people to think from an automation mindset. I am a huge fan of analogies. And so we start talking about you might have your water bill on auto pay. You'll still check it. You'll still check to make sure you're not paying too much or you didn't use too much water. But you're paying that automatically so you don't forget. Your electrical bill, your credit card bill, whatever these might be for your particular instance. These are things that you're automating in your life, but you still verify. You're still invested in the system and the process, but you don't want to rely on your human nature to forget. Or if you get sick, you want that to continue functioning. When you're driving your car, a lot of that is automated now. You come across a slick part of the road, you're not having to pump your brakes. It automatically has a braking system. Now with a lot of cars having, what are they called? Sensors. Modern cars with safety features. Now you accidentally approach a car too fast, all those cars with modern sensor features in the front, the ultrasonics, they stop your car for you. It's not that you're not in control of the process or what you're doing. But you're automating a lot of things to protect yourself and everyone around you from things that go wrong. So in your day-to-day job, you might be doing a lot of things constantly and you have to really pay attention to a certain thing. What if you could extract a lot of that information, kind of automate some of that and make it so that way you don't have to think so hard every single day. It's just kind of easier. When we deployed password managers, the idea was not to just simply force you to use password managers. It was like, why do you want to remember 100 passwords? Remove that from your brain power. Take it out of your head, give yourself some space to think about some more fun things in life. And rely on a password manager to store all of your passwords. And the benefit of it, the coincidental benefit from this psychological trick, oh, every one of your passwords is unique. What magic, right? But the benefit we give them is why this is going to help you, what's going to be great about this for you. I don't care about the IT side when I'm helping the user. It's all about let's figure out what's the piece of the puzzle that's actually getting you to be happy. And if we can tell them that, they're like, oh, okay, that makes a lot of sense. And then thankfully tech is pretty ubiquitous now. We can kind of help them get some technology in place to do something. But it's just taking away those like, what do you hate about your job? What if we could take that task away from you? So that way you can do the fun things that you actually enjoy and not this really boring thing. Yeah, I'm a huge fan of showing the benefits. Like, let me take this one really low-hanging fruit and do this thing. And show you how much time you can save. And then from there, hopefully they'll get kind of like, oh, I can kind of actually start doing things. Like our HR department, we used to hire someone. They would send an email to facilities, make sure you had a desk. Send an email to IT, make sure they had an account, a username. Then they had to send someone out to someone else in HR to make sure they had the hoodie and the swag and everything. So now the HR system, we automate all those processes. Everybody gets a Jira ticket now. And we just have a weekly 15-minute meeting with all the new people that are starting next month. To make sure everyone's on the same page. But just those little things, it took like 15 minutes of tech work to do that. It saved an admin close to four hours of work. So now they're coming to us begging us to automate more processes. That's the kind of thing I'm hoping to see. I've been pitching for two years to get an automation position added. Whether or not that'll ever become a thing. I'm getting everything dumped on me in IT. I love it. People want it. But just like a James example, they come to us to build all the automations. It would be great. Somebody did mention creating the subject matter specialists. But creating your subject matter experts in each department. So they can at least do some of the process. Yeah, that was one of the things I was going to mention. Patrick said he develops champions in each department to work with and train. So then the knowledge spreads. Yes. Rather than having IT trainers. That is always going to be a better... I saw a Reddit post. Someone was doing a training or consulting for a company. And they were like, I'm usually doing 10 to 20 people training them on whatever it was. I got a client that wants a thousand of their employees trained. And it was like, okay, you have to segment that. You can't train a thousand people. It doesn't work ever. You go to any classroom lecture. There's not a thousand students in the lecture hall typically. Or maybe at a giant university or something. But you have to segment that. You have to pick your best candidates, train those people, develop those champions. And then they can go and help you train the rest of the people. You still have to be involved in the process. But now you have 50 people to help you train versus you doing everything on your own. Those ideas can take... You can take those ideas to everything else in the automation. It's having just one person. Working with your most technical HR representative. Your most technical finance person or sales or marketing person. And see what they're doing and get them to have a more efficient job with automation. And then they'll brag about it to their coworkers. And then everyone can benefit. And then all of a sudden, if you really want to extract it to the business ROI, you've made your job more efficient for the workers you currently have. Maybe you're not dying for that extra hire now. And the company can save the resources and apply them to something else. And as we grow organically or whatever to actually need a proper another hire, that person is going to come into our organization and be able to work way more efficiently than if everything was manual. So the business can get a huge benefit out of this as well. Not just simply having technical fun stuff. There's a true financial boon that can be gained from automating a lot of the time that you spend on certain things. Yeah. And I guess kind of the last question I have is when it comes to things that shouldn't be automated, is there anything that should have at least some element of that human touch to it? There might be parts that you do automate. Is there anything that should have that person? Anything that requires compassion. Don't automate a PIP, for God's sake. Don't be like, you didn't hit your KPIs. There's an automated email that says you're in trouble. Maybe automate that to the manager and have the manager do a manual touch on to that instance. But I've seen people try to automate everything and it destroys culture. And you just don't have a human element of your company. Otherwise, what's the point? I don't like automating a lot of interactions. So a lot of the stuff that we're going to automate is not something you need feedback for. You don't need to collect more information from somebody. If you're working on some certain tickets, there needs to be some interaction. You need to be able to ask questions and go back and forth. And I think from a customer service perspective, we get a lot more favorable of a response. And people respond better if you can give them at least a few minutes to go through and do it. Or at least make sure you do that occasionally. Make sure that they know that they're in the space behind the computer. Otherwise, we all might as well be AI. Nicholas said, my favorite is automating terminations and people's accounts get locked before they know they were terminated. Which sounds like an absolute nightmare. Yeah, it's been there. Oh, yeah. Not on the receiving end, but on the IT side. They're like, oh, at four o'clock, we're going to do this. I'm like, okay. So I'm like, all right, four o'clock. And then that person's now coming to my office. Why is my email not working anymore? Maybe you should go talk to someone. Right, yeah, you should go. Keep going down the hall. And everyone's like, you don't know? The automation fired without your knowledge? And you're like, I'll have to go look at the logs. Yeah, yeah. Well, awesome. Do you guys have any kind of last thoughts as far as tips on automation? Yeah, I'm a huge fan of the KISS rule, keep it simple. So if you follow that, you can do anything. Just find somewhere to get started. That's what I always push. Find somewhere to start, and it'll lead you somewhere new. I got nothing to add to those two things. That's perfect. I know those were very poignant and very good things to wrap up on. I guess I'll say don't be afraid to learn. Learn and fail. Part of the process. Yeah, yeah. Well, thank you all so much for joining. I really appreciate you taking the time out to discuss some of these things today. And like I mentioned earlier, I will have the recording. The recording will automatically be posted once the stream ends. It might take a few minutes to get uploaded into Circle, but it will be automatically uploaded. And then I will kind of post a list of key takeaways and things that you should know whenever you're getting started with automation. Or if you're continuing to improve your automations. Yeah, we'll go ahead and get that list out to you. And then we will be back in a couple of weeks. And actually, the next stream will be hosted on Zoom because it's going to be our first IT Leadership Lab Summit. So it's going to be a two-day event. The link to the day two workshops will be in the Zoom confirmation email. Since they're limited to 35 per session, we just wanted to make sure it wasn't, you know, a thousand people trying to fight over these few amount of spots. I think some of our speakers are in the chat, too. Yes, yeah. So Nate's actually going to be presenting, which is very exciting. And yeah, we're going to have a few speakers on. We actually got a trainer from Radical Candor to talk about that whole Radical Candor process and managing with Radical Candor. So it should be a really good stream and a really good summit. Let me drop the link in here. So if you guys are interested, you can sign up through that link and should sign you up for the Zoom. And then we'll be doing all of the day one sessions on Zoom. So they'll be available to anyone that wants to join. But yeah, in the meantime, take care and I hope y'all have a good rest of the week.
