Item: ConnectWise PSA
Rating: 7
Author: Kettric Midura

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

ConnectWise was used across the entire organization. We primarily used it for sales, project management, and support management. It was the single source of all work to be sold, deployed or supported.

Pros and Cons

Workflow Automation was probably the most useful, but limited in its application. Once you had it working as you wanted, it would run forever.
Clear and easy to understand flow for ticketing. While you are not able to change the layout of the ticket form, once you got used to it, it mapped nicely to the call flow.
Rich data mining and reporting, if you did the work to enter in all your data.

Time Keeping was designed by an accountant, not an engineer. The number of clicks needed to move time was painful at times.
Up front administrative and management time was significant. Frequently having to devote 8 to 16 hours a week, just clicking through screens to ensure time, tickets, billing, and invoicing were correct before allowing the automation to kick in and send out bills was hard to justify at times.
Workflow automation was great, once you figured out how to do what you wanted inside the thought process of ConnectWise. Some fields you would expect to be available as triggers were simply not a selection. Complicating matters was having to create a single thread per potential trigger, quickly became bloated when you had to add nested workflow.
Frequent product updates, frequently having to drop out of the product and clear your cache, made the product unwieldy. The web version did alleviate this and improved speed.

Return on Investment

There is a short learning curve for department users of the product, but there is a very long learning curve for people administering or setting up the product. I would recommend that any one attempting to implement the product take a few weeks to get certified in the product or be formally trained in the product prior to any discussions around implementation. Once setup, there are a number of things you may not be able to change until the fiscal year is up.
ConnectWise is very good at what it does, but you do need to ensure that the data being entered is accurate and timely. Lackadaisical data entry or delays in getting your data into the system will magnify accuracy issues and lead to difficult to manage backlogs of data entry. Setup a time weekly to ensure your data is entered, reviewed, and approved to be able to fully use each module.
Document your process, even if it is automated. I found myself in a number of situations where I needed to alter workflow or process to fix a problem, and not only fixed my piece of the problem but generated cascade issues for other departments. Implement a detailed and strict Change Management program and review every change before implementing it, no matter how small.

Alternatives Considered

Overall the product is like many other ticketing systems and CRMs, it does a good job of tracking your work, time, and sales leads. But ConnectWise does really well at ensuring every t is crossed and every I is dotted. There are a significant number of mechanisms in place to ensure that the work you need to do, is done correctly, and done the way you want it. When it comes to support that is predictable and reproducible, ConnectWise really excels. Between templates and activities, you can list out every step in a well thought out process to ensure every step of it is completed in a timely fashion.

Likelihood to Renew

I would recommend ConnectWise for the company that isn't as large or ridged in their support practices. ConnectWise is very good at what it does, but when it comes to truly customized process, it tends to cause problems. While ConnectWise is flexible, it is only flexible in the way their mind set and architecture function. If you are a large well developed company with set ways of doing things, ConnectWise is not likely to be a good fit. If you are a smaller, less developed company with the capacity to adapt to ConnectWise methodology, you can make some quick gains implementing their way of doing things. The SMB company I was working with on the product used the product exclusively and used it well. We used each product to its extent, and it really helped to speed up the development cycle accepting the intended use of each function. A much larger company I worked with had the exact opposite experience. Their standing procedures and methodologies were diametrically opposed to the use of ConnectWise and ultimately drove the company to abandon the project in favor of a home grown product.

Likelihood to Recommend

I would recommend ConnectWise for environments that do not already have a set way of doing things. Primarily due to the rigidity of the ConnectWise system, it is best to learn how it works completely before attempting to map existing processes to the product. You may be surprised to see they have a better or more efficient way of doing things natively in the system.

Usability

I would say an 8 from the user's perspective, but less from the admin perspective. Once setup, the process would flow as directed, and users would either be limited by or freed by the automation as it relates to performing work. From the admin's perspective, getting that automation setup was very time consuming and redundant if you had to apply the same configurations to more than one board. I would frequently loose and afternoon to a configuration change when it required updating the subcategories of a number of boards I had created in the past. But, once past that configuration challenge, it would work very well.

Usability Pros and Cons

Pros	Cons
Relatively simple Easy to use Well integrated Consistent Quick to learn Convenient Feel confident using	Requires technical support Lots to learn

Easy Tasks

Leads, Tickets, and products are very easy to configure in a way that end users would understand.
The reporting is very intuitive, but only as good as the data that has been vetted and validated.
Creating a ticket, or template, for support was quick and easy, but only in static environments. The more dynamic environment, the less this feature could be used.

Difficult Tasks

Initial Setup was full of pitfalls that made it easy to make lasting and painful mistakes if you chose the wrong items at the wrong times.
Getting an expert level knowledge of the product takes better part of a year in practice application before you true know what you really needed to implement to make your experience great. I would definitely recommend you hire and expert or work with their support team closely to implement the product.

Mobile Interface Availability and Impressions

Yes - The mobile interface was much the same as their other interfaces. A few less features like history and audit trails, but most everything was there in some form.

A case study in ConnectWise

Software Version

Modules Used

Overall Satisfaction with ConnectWise