Time to Stop Rolling Your Own

Time to Stop Rolling Your Own - - Lessons Learned, Episode 33

Long ago, most people either didn't keep track of service requests in any meaningful way, or they used something like Excel spreadsheets to track what needed to be done. Many used Outlook or another email system, along with its calendar function.

More sophisticated folks (like us) either used a customized database built in MS Access or maybe even SQL, or they built their own ticket tracking system on their web site. Having been in the HTML business literally since it was invented, I built my own on our web site. 

The "front end" was surprisingly easy. Web forms with drop-downs for technician names, client names, priorities, etc. made everything super easy. And we hosted it ourselves, so it was easy to update. This was before WordPress, so you had to actually know something about HTML. 

The front end was password protected, but allowed technicians to log in from any client desktop or server and enter tickets or work tickets. Even back then, we required technicians to put all their time and notes into the system before they closed the ticket.

It didn't have all the bells and whistles of a "real" PSA, but it got the job done. 

For onsite monitoring, we used the alerts built into the Windows Server or SBS operating system, supplemented by alerts from Servers Alive. It was particularly easy to tell if any service went down, as SA allowed us to generate alerts if it couldn't access the network, a web site, an email system, and so forth. Servers Alive is still around (https://www.woodstone.nu/salive/), but I haven't used it in years.

But all of that took a bit of maintenance. Microsoft products needed constant attention and updates, so we were doing regular maintenance on our own systems as well as our clients.

And then, along came ConnectWise. It was crazy expensive, but it took about one minute to realize all the functionality it would bring to our operation. Not just the service board, but tracking time and billing as well. 

We also adopted the original Kaseya RMM product shortly after we adopted ConnectWise. We tried other RMMs, but none was really ready for primetime. Kaseya was also absurdly expensive, but provided great features. 

One important lesson we learned from evaluating, adopting, and implementing these tools has survived for the last twenty years. We configured the tools to do business our way. We did not reconfigure our business to fit the default configuration and functionality of the tools.

A secondary lesson, which we had suspected, was that our "roll your own" version of PSA and RMM functionality had been taking a great deal of overhead labor. People frequently kid themselves about the work involved in avoiding bigger, more expensive paid solutions. But when you track all your time, it becomes more difficult to hide this overhead labor from yourself.

Conclusions: 

1) There is always room for rolling your own solutions for running and managing your business, and delivering your services.

2) It's important to know when it's time to move to a more professional, paid toolset.

3) You need to develop and document your processes and procedures, and configure the tools to do things your way. Ultimately, your system is your brand and your unique selling proposition. If you view your system as a system, you can fix any problem and address any challenge.

4) As time goes on, you will waste more of your time and resources continuing to roll your own that you would have spent buying a system that already has more functionality than you will ever build in-house.

Feedback Welcome.

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All comments welcome.

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Episode 33

This Episode is part of the ongoing Lessons Learned series. For all the information, and an index of Lessons Learned episodes, go to the Lessons Learned Page. https://blog.smallbizthoughts.com/p/lessons-learned-blog-series.html

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