Why Renada waits until a ticket is claimed before building any project tasks

Connor: If you're not using ticket or project templates in HaloPSA, you've probably got tiny feet now. That doesn't mean anything, but I do have your attention. Good day, I am Connor, and we are jumping feet first today into HaloPSA to look at ticket and project templates. Before we jump into it, I'm going to explain what they're used for, then I'm going to show you how to make one, and then hopefully by the end of this video you will be able to have an idea or inclination of how these can be leveraged inside of your HaloPSA build.

So with that being said, let's jump straight into it. You are looking at HaloPSA. And before we do anything else, let's explain what they are. So ticket or project templates are the same thing. They are just ticket templates basically. And they can be leveraged in multiple ways. Honestly, the first way is that if you have a product inside of HaloPSA that you sell on a sales order, you can have the ability to create a project from that line item. Now what I mean by that is you could sell, I don't know, laptop setup, and then once you've sold that, you could then create a project to set up the laptop.

Second of all, when you're creating a new ticket, you could select from a template. So we could go to a new ticket over here and we could apply a template and we can basically inject loads of settings or, what's the other word for it, I don't know, you can apply loads of defaults to the ticket basically. So you can maybe have custom fields filled out, subject, detail, summary, all that stuff, which you can automatically apply. I use it also for building out all of my projects, and that is what I'm going to showcase today.

So before we do that, let me show you exactly what I mean. So the way I like to build projects out, and this is still open for debate, I keep going around the houses with this, but essentially you create a new project and I'm just going to create this. This is an example project. I know, riveting name. And we're going to go ahead and make it.

So we've made this new project, then we're going to triage it. And in our, the way we recommend is you create this project triage or this triage project, and then from here you then define what the project is. So I'm going to select this is an onboarding project, and this is an onboarding for an MSP customer. And I'm just going to go ahead and press save. That is that project now triaged.

Now what's happening when I'm doing that is that's now going to apply a template to the ticket type onboarding. And because I had the dropdown MSP customer, that's also going to apply defaults or rules, if you will, to that project so it knows what tasks it needs to build out. And you'll see here on my screen that it's slowly tinkering away. But basically what's happening is a bunch of child tickets, or if you're in projects we just call them tasks, it's the same thing, but essentially these are just tasks. And we have a to-do list defined, we have knowledge-based articles attached, you get the idea.

This isn't overly useful. This is just a placeholder from Bookstack at the minute, but you get the idea. So how does this all work? Well, it's fairly simple when you know how, which is probably the story of Halo.

So just to go back very quickly, um, this is our project. It's applied a template. That template has defined a bunch of tasks or a bunch of child tickets it's going to make, and also those child tickets have their own templates, if you will, which then apply how they're built. So if I go on to ongoing monitoring and support, we have a checklist, schedule regular reviews and updates with the client, and this is just an example of how you could do a full onboarding process.

So let me show you how to do all this. So first of all, you want to go to configuration. You want to go to tickets, and then you want to go to ticket templates. This is the same for projects, just to be clear. In here you will see two things. You will see ticket templates, and then you will see child template. The ticket template is what you apply to the parent ticket, and the child template is what is created underneath that parent. And I'll show you how this works.

So you just click new in the top right, as I just did, and you'll be asked to enter a name. So if I just show you, you click new, you enter a name, and you can select a group. If you don't have these groups, I will show you later where you make these, but it's just a way to group your templates together.

Once you've done that, you will then be presented with the values page. And the values page is very important for one thing, and that is you must select a ticket type in here. If you don't, you basically can't really use the template. And then a summary. So you could generate a summary. You could do something like dollar area, which is what we use a lot, which is basically the customer name. You could default the details of the ticket, the status, the team, the agent, the priority, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

And the nice thing now is that you can also update custom fields. So if I was just to go to incident, I believe where there are custom fields on it, you will see down the bottom additional fields, and again you can then define what those look like. So if you was to make a template with loads of different custom fields and categorisation and all sorts of bits and pieces, you could essentially define all this in a template to save you selecting it every single time.

In my scenario, we're just going to keep this with onboarding and leave it like so. And we're not going to do too much craziness with this. So we're just going to say area onboarding project so it will be the customer name, Renada Solutions Limited onboarding project.

To-do list, this is where you can create a to-do list. Make sure you say nice words to the customer. And then you can press save or add, add, save, save, save. I know what I'm doing. Save, get another one. Make sure to send. Make sure you send chocolates. And again, you can order these checklists on the ticket, and you can even go as far as saying only show these tasks or checklist items to certain customers. So you could say whenever we make a project for ex customer, make sure we always do this thing.

I'm going to remove these for now. We don't need a to-do list on this parent. And then we define the children, and this is where your life can get very, very creative.

So I'm just going to pause there because at this stage you won't have any children. So to make children, what you need to think, and this is something that people get caught up on a lot, is when you're building a project, as I have here, we have an unassigned project. Just look at my project here, and then you have all the tasks or children within that project. Think about what they need to be.

Now I think a lot of people think about this in the wrong way, and I'll give an example. These are tickets and child tickets. What you don't want is to build a project for set up a new laptop and then make forty tickets: change the BIOS name, make sure secure boots on, rename the PC. Does not need to be separate tickets. It will take you more time trying to complete the project inside of Halo than actually doing the task. So what I recommend is you have a project new hardware set up, and then you can define within there laptop, desktop, whatever you want, and it's a single ticket.

Now what you might, might say for the project is actually we have three tickets. Step one is to, you know, procure the laptop. Step two, or ticket two, is set up the laptop. And step three is delivery and hand over the laptop. As opposed to flash the BIOS as a whole ticket type, you've got to claim, add notes, and you know it becomes lengthy. So just try and think about it from a level above where your mind may be at.

Again, not tying so you'll probably know this way better than me. So what we've done with onboarding is we have, you know, transition planning is the first ticket, set up the services is the second ticket, and within here we've made a to-do list. So setup CSP, CIPP, Pax8, NinjaOne, Renada store. And what we're going to do is attach a knowledge-based article to this ticket with how to set up all of these things. And they're probably just going to be hyperlinks to Hudu or hyperlink to IT Glue or Bookstack or whatever documentation platform you have, which breaks this down in a checklist or a guide basically.

I don't generally believe Halo is what you want to be replicating as your documentation platform in terms of project templates.

So once you understand what you want your task to be, head back to tickets and templates, and what you want to do is start making child templates. Now your child templates are just your child tickets. And again, you click new and you follow the same process. However, what we do in this scenario, um, if we look at setup MSP Services, is we not only have a to-do list, but what we've also started to think about is well, what if we had a grandchild ticket where you can provision CIPP, Office 365, and they could have their own knowledge-based articles attached.

When I mentioned at the start of the video we keep going around the houses with this one, it's because it needs to be as least, or have the least amount of friction as possible. But also make sure it's quite robust. And that's where I go back and forth all the time. My brain was in the right spin.

But with each child task, you basically the idea in my head is you give it a nice summary, you add a to-do list, and then maybe you can default some values, maybe team or agent, or you know, set some fields, attach an article for instance, just to hold or handhold your engineers through that task in that project.

Once you've made some of these child templates out, you want to go back to your parent template. So we'll go back to onboarding here, and what you simply want to do is click add and then add in all of your child tickets or child templates to this parent. And then press save.

What's going to happen then is when you next create or apply this template, it's going to make all of those child tickets directly under the project, as you saw in my environment.

However, and this is the real key and the real clever bit to Halo, is the fact you can apply rules. Now I didn't give you a fair demonstration at the start of this because my rules was very much encapsulating everything. So let's do another project and let me show you what I mean by that.

This is a test two example to project. And this time what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to set up, or I'm going to provision now, I'm going to do security services, but I want to set up both BitDefender and Huntress. Okay, and then I'm going to press save. And what this is going to do for me is it's going to make me two tasks, one for BitDefender and one for Huntress.

Quick tea break while it does this. This is where I'm not built it currently doesn't actually work. Refresh maybe.

Let's do some live troubleshooting. So we have setup Security Services. If I go to my tickets, ticket types, Security Services, do we have the template applied now? Automatically apply the following template when this ticket is logged or changed. And you see here that I can't select a template. That's because, as I mentioned earlier, if we go back to tickets and templates and security services and values, we have to make sure we have a ticket type set. If not, we can't use it.

So in here I want to select the ticket type setup Security Services. That allows me to then go back to my ticket, ticket type, Security Services, defaults tab, edit, go down to template, and then I can select that template. This way now when I go to projects, create a new project. Actually, we'll just triage this one here and select Security Services. That's going to select that ticket type, it's going to apply that template, and then the rules on that template are what I'm defining here by a multiple select field. And that is the next thing I will show you.

So BitDefender and Huntress, save. And what this should do now, unless I've still not built it correctly, is start to build out both of these. So if I just do a quick refresh, you will now see that Huntress and BitDefender tasks have been created underneath this project.

And the way you control that, and the whole point of this demonstration is as follows. So we've said we have this child parent project, and within there we have these two child tasks. But the way I build templates is I don't always want these to appear. I want it to be your choice.

So what we say is it only create the task BitDefender, only create the task Huntress when we select that option from a multiple select dropdown box. And that is what you're seeing me doing.

So to do that super simple, if I just edit and delete this rule, delete here, you will see that there are no creation rules for this child template currently set. This means that it will always create it. So if I press edit, click on the rule, and then select from one of these options.

So you could create after closing another task. So you could have, you know, set up, you know, build the laptop. As soon as that's closed, then it's then deploy the laptop. It can automatically make and remove tasks as and when. You can do it after a certain number of working days. So you could have a project, and after thirty days it could make a task which is to a project manager to check in on the project.

You can create it after a particular action is done, and this is how we use it at Renada. So when we create a project, all the tasks aren't created until we claim it. And that's just because we could obviously have five to ten to twenty projects sat in the pipeline, and what I don't want is two hundred tasks out there until I'm ready to start them. You can create it when approval status has changed, so, you know, start project only start on approval. You can do it when a checkbox has been checked. So you could have a checkbox on that triage screen or new ticket screen.

But what we do, without going through all of these, is a multiple select. And what we do is we make multiple select fields, and we call them the same as the ticket type. So setup Security Services, and I'm saying I want to create the BitDefender task when I select the option BitDefender. Like so.

And that is how you start making, in my opinion, really good dynamic projects. Onboarding was slightly different because what we have in that select is three options: an MSP customer, a security customer, or a break-fix customer. And what I've said is when we select either MSP, security, or break-fix, use transition planning. However, with task two, I've said setup MSP Services if you select the MSP customer, and setup Security Services if you set up a security customer. And again, it's meaning we're not having to plan these out every single time. We can build these as a team and then deploy it.

The final thing I want to show you is the fact that um, these are amazing, but to make them a little bit better, you can do what I've done on mine, which use the Kanban view. So hopefully that makes sense to everyone. Essentially we're making a task with a child task, if you will, or a ticket with a child ticket. We're then adding all the child tickets to the template, and then defining rules on what is leveraged to create them.

And in my environment we just have a new project. This is my sandbox, of course. We have a new project, and when we triage it, we're selecting the ticket type which has a template defaulted to it, and then we have a dropdown selection which defines what tasks it's going to make. And the more things you bring into your stack, the more robust you get this, could get bigger and bigger and bigger. Then you can really start making dynamic projects for whatever it is you're selling or doing.

Last thing I want to show you is the Kanban view. So if I just go to this one over here, you will notice that we've enabled it to be the Kanban view. And the reason we've done that, and I will show you this, um, where did I show you this, down, down here, is because you can format the Kanban card. And again, this can really help you with your projects to understand whereabouts you are within your templates.

So again, for us we just do estimated time, how much time we've spent, um, what the task is, when we last did something on it. And this for me means when I load up a project, I can quickly see what's new, what's in progress, what's waiting on the customer, how much time we've spent at each task, and where we're at in that workflow.

And that is all I'm going to go through today. I hope this has been insightful. I hope this helps you understand a little bit of how all this works. I know I've been jumping about the place today, but there's loads of information, and I know a lot of you quite now are quite aware with Halo. I've been kind of vague in some things. If you have any questions, please as always put them down in the description below. I will be doing a video directly on projects and this template mechanism soon to show you how we build them out and how we do some of the cool stuff. But for now I hope that project or ticket template video has been helpful. Have a beautiful day. I'll see you all soon. Bye-bye for now.