However, choosing the right documentation system requires some careful consideration. Although every company has its own unique requirements, we can provide you with some vital tips to help you choose the right solution for your business. In this blog, we’ll explore the different factors to be considered when selecting a new documentation system.

Use this handy checklist to determine the right documentation solution for your business.

Define Your Strategy

The key to choosing the right documentation solution starts with defining your strategy. You need to identify clear objectives first and ensure they are built into your workflow automation strategy from the beginning.

Your automation strategy should not be a random process. There should be a definite reason behind your need for automation. Every process that you automate should contribute to at least one of the following:

• Reducing costs
• Increasing efficiency
• Enhancing profitability
• Facilitating growth

Once you have set your objectives, you need to conduct an in-house audit to determine where your attention is needed the most. Identify areas with broken workflows or areas where resources are utilized too much. Determine how these processes can be enhanced with automated documentation.

After identifying the processes that need to be enhanced, you need to turn your dream scenario into reality by writing it down. Involve your team in the process and get their feedback. Don’t rule anything out. At the rate at which technology is evolving, you will be pleasantly surprised to find a solution that meets all your needs.

Do the Groundwork

This is where the real work begins. This step should not be underestimated since it plays a crucial role in helping you make an informed decision when choosing the right solution.

You need to check with your peers about their experiences, seek their advice and ensure you sift through plenty of vendors and options. Build a project plan and proposal that will address the following:

• Who will take care of the ins and outs of the project?
• Who will be responsible for the implementation and go live?
• Who will be informing customers of process changes that may affect them and the service they receive?
• How are they going to do it and what are their timescales?

By finding answers to these questions, you can ascertain whether the project and outcomes are actually feasible within your organization. These research findings must be shared with your team in a well-planned meeting and their feedback must be obtained.

It is worth considering the collective input of your team. However, when it comes to making the actual decision, there should be one key individual leading the process who must also be responsible for delivery and standards from start to finish. This step is crucial because automation projects often fail when teams fail to identify a single project leader to lead the process.

Select a Solution

Once you have done the required groundwork, it is time to select the right solution. To do this the right way, you must make sure you have a solid understanding of the integrations that are available to you and how these will impact the wider business. You also need to consult with your vendors and discuss how they plan on approaching automation.

Choosing a solution purely based on price is not a good idea. What you must focus on is the value you derive from a solution. In most cases, price and functionality go hand in hand. You must also exercise caution and not get carried away by big-name brands. You need to choose a vendor that understands your business, size and makeup.

When choosing a solution, you need to think about the future rather than focusing only on your existing requirements. Check with your vendor about the product roadmap and how they see the solution transitioning to meet evolving documentation requirements. Find out about your vendor partner’s focus on research & development (R&D) and discuss any future portfolio releases that could complement your setup.

Salespeople should be able to have an in-depth discussion with you about how their solution will grow with your business. Ask them for their opinions and utilize their experience of working with your peers on similar projects. This will help you get some new ideas.

Use our IT Documentation Buyer’s Guide to know everything about choosing the right documentation solution.

Robust Documentation With IT Glue

Centralized documentation can help you accomplish great things by boosting efficiency in your workflow. IT Glue is a purpose-built documentation solution for all IT professionals. Our solution can help you automate the entire documentation process with integrations and open API. With this robust tool, all your mission-critical information can be easily accessed at any time.

IT Glue’s SOC 2-compliant documentation platform features an immutable audit trail, multifactor authentication and next-generation password management engine, all of which are fully integrated and linked with all your documentation.

Watch our webinar “Mastering IT Documentation” to learn more about implementing a new documentation system successfully.

Watch Now!

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How do you arrive at the right IT documentation solution for your business? An important, very much valid question at this juncture. Read on to find out three deal breakers you must look out for when comparing IT documentation solutions.

Standardized, centralized and structured documentation 

All three are equally important attributes. Standardization ensures consistency in documentation, while centralization and structure make the information easy to access.

Find out if the solution comes with pre-built documentation templates for flexible assets. Besides bringing consistency across end-users, these templates act as a guide to your entire team — allowing them to document and troubleshoot faster.

Ideally, documentation should be recorded in a structured format so that related items can be linked together and stored in an interconnected hub. Because the data that exists in silos is harder to locate, understand or put to use.

Hence, look for the solution that has a central hub where you can create logical, two-way connections between pieces of information. That way, your employees won’t have to search for related information each time; it automatically pops up on the right-hand side of their screen. Not only does it improve your team’s efficiency, but it also makes them independent.

High degree of automation 

Let’s be honest, documentation is a tedious and time-consuming activity. Given a choice, not many in your organization would want to do it. So, asking employees to document everything manually may not be a good idea.

Instead, go for a documentation solution that offers a high degree of automation. Ensure it has open APIs, integrations with the rest of your tech stack (RMM, PSA, BC/DR) and the ability to make bulk changes or uploads. The aim should be to try and automate as much as you can. Your employees will be much happier, and they will get more time to focus on their core tasks.

Secure environment 

Typically, a documentation solution houses a lot of sensitive information, including passwords, user credentials, firewall data, critical SOPs, among other things. With cyber criminals on the prowl more than ever, you can’t opt for a solution with weak defenses. Data breaches, downtimes and cyber-attacks can cost you a fortune and cause irreparable damage to your reputation.

While evaluating different documentation solutions, keep an eye out for the measures they have taken to protect the security and privacy of the data entrusted with them. A platform that takes security seriously will provide features such as MFA, SSO, granular security permissions, host-proof hosting for passwords. Most importantly, they will be SOC 2 compliant.

Wrapping up 

There are certainly few more factors that you should look at, such as pricing, customer support, user interface, and other requirements specific to your company. However, ultimately, the platform you choose should help your team become more efficient and grow your business faster.

And that’s what IT Glue is all about. We come from an MSP background and have built our product with the sole mission of improving the efficiency of MSP and internal IT teams. We offer every functionality listed above and so much more.

If you’re ready to take the next step and get a better sense of how IT Glue works, the major features, and the advantages to your business, download our IT Glue Buyer’s Guide.

Download Our IT Glue Buyer’s Guide

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RMM (Remote Monitoring & Management)

It’s hard to service what you can’t see, and that’s why the RMM is probably the most important part of the MSP stack. The RMM space is highly competitive, which means there’s a lot of choice in terms of features and integrations. Look for an RMM that integrates well with your other key tools, and you’ll get more value from it.

PSA (Professional Services Automation)

The concept for the PSA is to serve as a hub for a lot of what you do. This central role makes the PSA an essential part of the stack for most managed service companies, especially ones that intend to scale. The legacy PSA systems are often feature-rich, but can also be unwieldy as a result. Lighter PSAs strip out some of the bells & whistles in favor of a focus on core functions.

IT Documentation

Where the RMM and PSA gather a lot of the information you need to run a managed services business, your documentation platform serves as the hub for all of that data. IT Glue has a ton of integrations, makes it easy to automate almost everything, and the related items feature allows you to get value from your documentation in the form of increased technician efficiency.  If there’s other documentation platforms out there, I wouldn’t know about that.

Backup & Disaster Recovery

There’s two reasons why you need these two functions in your stack. One is that your clients need you to provide these services in case bad things happen; it’s an important part of managing their IT.  The second reason is that your clients will pay you for it. Backup and disaster recovery is a pretty good revenue generator for MSPs and you didn’t get into business to leave money laying around on the table.

Now when you pull back to see the big picture, one other thing stands out. These four essential MSP software tools need to work well together. The stronger the integrations between the different parts of your stack, the smoother the flow of information will be, the more efficient your team will be, and the better position you’ll be to effectively manage IT for your clients. So when researching, don’t just look at the list of integrations on a company’s webpage, but get under the hood a little bit and see precisely how those integrations will help your business.

With that said, I will now leave you to research your options.

Except for documentation.

For that you need IT Glue. Take a peek at our demo video and see for yourself.

Yes, I’d like a demo!

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IT Glue

IT Glue – A 45 Day Review

IT Glue has been on the “shiny and cool toys” list for a lot of MSPs lately. If I am honest, I struggled making the leap. The demos look like many other documentation management solutions and when I checked them out at IT Nation in 2015, I really just wasn’t sold. However, a few months went by and I still didn’t have a document management solution I was happy with. We had tried Nilear, because in concept, the ConnectWise tools are awesome, but in practice, it was too slow and did not give us the solution we were looking for.

So looking for further proof, I went hunting for anyone who could sell me on this tool. I found a good video of an MSP who was doing a rundown of their “stack” and part of it was IT Glue. From that point on I was sold.

1. Customizable solution

The single best feature any tool can have, in my opinion, is the ability to acknowledge they don’t have the answer to everything!  IT Glue have included a way for people to build in what they want. IT Glue has lots of cool default things, but using only default configs doesn’t make you great at what you do — it makes you average. So step one for us was tearing into the defaults, changing what we felt would not work for us and building it in a way that would. Simple stuff, like custom fixed assets to make data more readily available, adding/removing fields, changing what fields mean or are linked to, etc.

Our Process: 

• I spent some time (okay, a lot of time) reviewing and aligning everything with what I thought we wanted and developed standards for how to enter data.
• We then had everyone come in on a Saturday so there would be no interruptions, we did a one-hour training session. After that, everyone picked a couple of clients they knew a lot about, and for the next 4 hours we sat as a group and filled in as much about those clients as we could.
• My main focus during that period was to make on-the-fly changes to any formats we didn’t like, answer questions about how the data should be entered, and if there was ever a standard that was needed we would all pause, collaborate briefly, set the standard and move forward.
• It got everyone engaged in the process, they took ownership as they had a say in implementation, and we started building momentum with getting client data into IT Glue. 

2. Creating a documentation culture

3. Related items are key

4. Put everything in IT Glue 

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