Picture this: your technicians finally breaking free from the cycle of repetitive tasks, your MSP gaining momentum, and innovation spreading across your organization.
That’s the potential of automation but where do you even start? The key is identifying the right processes to automate and setting clear benchmarks for success.
This blog is your starting guide to automation, packed with practical steps to help you navigate the journey. From pinpointing automation-ready tasks to evaluating their impact and taking a strategic, no-fluff approach, we’ll walk you through what it takes to maximize efficiency and scale your business.
Stick around as we dive into real-world use cases, expert recommendations, and hands-on tips to help your MSP unlock the true power of automation.
1. Collaborate to Spot Automation Opportunities
The first step toward automation success? Spotting the easiest tasks to automate, those repetitive, time-consuming processes that follow a set structure. If a task can be documented step by step, it’s a strong candidate for automation.
One way to do this is by getting your team involved in the conversation. Encouraging employees to share their daily frustrations helps uncover hidden inefficiencies that might otherwise go unnoticed.
Some organizations create dedicated discussion threads or automation idea boards, where team members highlight tasks they’d rather offload to AI or automation tools. Others hold regular brainstorming sessions to identify processes that waste time and could be streamlined.
By crowdsourcing automation ideas, companies can pinpoint high-impact opportunities while fostering a culture where employees feel empowered to improve workflows. The result? More efficiency, less frustration, and a team that spends more time on strategic, meaningful work.
2. Prioritize What to Automate First
Now that you have a solid list of automation opportunities, the next step is figuring out where to start. While it might be tempting to say, “Let’s automate everything,” the real challenge is deciding which tasks will have the biggest impact.
A smart approach is to target small, repetitive tasks that seem insignificant on their own but add up to hours of lost productivity. Think about those daily manual processes that take just a couple of minutes but when multiplied across your team and clients, they turn into a major time drain.
For example, simple actions like updating tickets, sending routine follow-ups, or manually approving requests might seem minor. But if each technician spends just two minutes per task, multiple times a day, across dozens of clients, that time quickly snowballs into hours of unnecessary work.
The key is to identify these hidden inefficiencies and start automating them first. Even small automations can free up your team’s time, reduce frustration, and boost overall efficiency all without disrupting your existing workflows.
3. Define Your Automation Criteria
With a refined list of automation opportunities in hand, the next step is to set clear criteria for what makes the most sense to automate. While it’s tempting to automate anything and everything, not every process is an immediate priority. Instead, focus on tasks that are structured, repetitive, and easy to execute without human intervention.
Before diving in, ask yourself these key questions:
If you can confidently check off these points, that task is a prime candidate for automation. But if there are gaps such as missing documentation or technical limitations it might be best to hold off until those barriers are addressed.
For example, many MSPs start by automating recurring service requests, ticket categorization, or standard troubleshooting steps, processes that are already well-documented and repeated frequently. By leveraging existing workflows and structured templates, teams can eliminate hours of manual work each month while improving efficiency and consistency.
Setting clear automation criteria ensures that your MSP tackles the most impactful automations first, creating immediate value without unnecessary complexity. The key is to start with what’s already structured, scale strategically, and refine as you go.
4. Analyze the Payoff
After identifying the best automation opportunities for your MSP, the next step is to weigh the benefits against the effort required. A payoff analysis helps determine which automations will deliver the biggest return on investment (ROI) and should be tackled first.
Start by calculating the time saved versus the time and resources needed to implement automation. If a workflow takes hours to complete manually but only minutes to automate, that’s an easy win. Even small-time savings, when multiplied across technicians and clients can add up to significant productivity gains.
For example, an MSP might find that automating user access requests, a task that typically takes a technician 5–10 minutes per request, can save dozens of hours each month.
Instead of manually approving, provisioning, or resetting access, automation ensures requests are handled instantly, reducing delays and freeing up valuable technician time.
By conducting a payoff analysis, MSPs can prioritize automations that offer the biggest efficiency boost with minimal effort. The goal is simple: focus on high-impact automations first, ensuring time and resources are invested where they’ll make the most difference.
5. Progress Over Perfection
One of the biggest roadblocks to automation is the belief that it needs to be perfect before it’s implemented. The reality? Waiting for perfection slows you down. The best approach is to start small, automate what you can, and improve over time.
Many MSPs get stuck trying to cover every possible scenario before launching an automation, but this often leads to delays and missed opportunities. Take, for example, an MSP that wanted to fully automate software installation requests and ticket triage.
Instead of rolling out automation in stages, they kept refining their process, trying to achieve a 100% perfect solution before deployment. The result? Months of wasted time with no automation in place.
A smarter approach would have been to first automate software installations, immediately reducing manual work. Once that was running smoothly, they could then expand the automation to handle ticket triage.
Even if the initial solution only addressed 75% of cases, that’s still a huge efficiency gain compared to doing everything manually.
The key takeaway? Start where you can, improve as you go, and let automation evolve because getting it done is better than waiting for perfection.
Wrapping it up!
Automation isn’t just about cutting out repetitive work, it’s about making your life easier, freeing up your team, and giving you the time to focus on what really matters. Imagine spending less time on tedious, manual tasks and more time growing your business, innovating, and actually enjoying your work.
The best way to get there? Start small. Look for quick wins, set clear priorities, and don’t stress about making it perfect right away. Even a simple automation can save you hours of frustration, and once you see the benefits, you’ll want to keep going.
So, what’s holding you back? Take that first step, start automating, and watch your business transform.