For any IT admin, and especially those responsible for in-flight telecoms changes, making constant changes to user setups can be a time-consuming and hard-fought process.
You’ve got user demands for instant change (without downtime), you’ve got to make sure those changes don’t impact existing configurations like call queues, and you’ve got to make sure everything gets documented.
In this blog post, we’re going to uncover what happens when you’re tasked with manual moves, adds, and changes then introduce a way to automate them if your company uses Microsoft Teams.
What are moves, adds, and changes?
Moves, adds, and changes, often shortened to MACs or MACDs (moves, adds, changes, deletions) are the tweaks in configuration you’re asked to make.
Usually associated with the world of IT, MACDs are one of the biggest timesucks for administrators and carry the potential to cause unwanted knock-on issues further down the line.
For instance, adding a Teams user to a new call queue might mean that queue is now overflowing with resource. As you’ve configured the queue to route to least idle, the new member of the queue is now taking tons more calls than planned. Here’s a classic example of failing to prepare = preparing to fail.
There’s an obvious fix to this one. Remove the user from the call queue or change your routing policy. Pressure relieved and the queue is back to normal.
Now, on the face of it, there might not seem anything from with this.
Spoiler alert: There is (and we’ll get to that in a second).
But this is also an example of a very basic, not-that-service-impacting type of change.
It’s the bulk MACs or the one with lots of little niggly changes that consume your attention for an entire afternoon. And let’s not get started with what happens when you need to call in help.
What’s the issue with manual moves, adds, and changes?
The problem with MACs is that they are seriously time-consuming and could be avoided.
What would you do if we removed all the time you spent on MACs and gave it you back?
- Focus on long-term projects
- Audit your Teams licenses
- Book vacation for more than a few days
- Take a decent lunch break for once
It won’t come as a surprise that you already know how much time these changes take. But some will write that time off as “it’s my job”. And there’s nothing wrong with that, by the way. It is what you’re employed to do.
However, there’s a list of other things you’re expected to complete as well. And, while we can’t help with everything, we can definitely help speed up the time taken on moves, adds, and changes.
If you’re still not convinced that you have that much time to save, see if this story relates…
The impact of manual moves, adds, and changes
Danny is an IT admin for a 2,000-user business. Their daily duties include:
- System administration
- Network management
- Running backups for key systems
- Troubleshooting cloud software tickets
- Helping with larger incident management
- Performance monitoring of key systems
At any one time, Danny can also be involved in large-scale projects like network upgrades, desktop refreshes, or phone system migrations. Their time is precious.
Yet, at least once a month, Danny gets an incoming ticket to make a change to a Teams user. It might be they need a new policy assigned, which is cunningly disguised as a feature request or a support ticket.
Once this has been unravelled to work out what the user actually needs, Danny must get approval from the user’s manager then assign the policy.
Danny runs the script to update the script and thinks everything is fine. The ticket gets closed off and Danny goes back to other tasks.
Only, the phone rings and that user’s manager is on the phone. Their user has lost access and now can’t function.
Danny put faith in the previous IT admin’s script and has paid the price. Now, they must work backwards to rectify the problem. After half an hour, it’s no good. There’s no undoing what has happened. Danny must delete the user account and start from scratch.
This means:
- Confirming requirements for the user’s particular setup
- Adding them to Entra as if they were a new user
- Adding them to relevant call queues
- Adding them to channels
- Assign relevant policies for feature access
- Testing with the user that everything works as before
What started out life as a one-off change has turned into an entire afternoon’s work, a disgruntled manager who may start to lose faith in the company’s IT department, and a user who could do very little while this all happened.
There are some obvious (and non-obvious) negatives to unpack here:
- The reputation of the IT team has been damaged; users may now try to remedy problems themselves and cause larger issues.
- Your personal reputation is damaged; you feel bad for causing an issue and are distracted an unconfident the rest of the day/week/month.
- With multiple users not able to complete their expected tasks this afternoon, the business isn’t as productive as it should have been; causing a small but genuine impact on the company’s bottom line.
This may seem extreme; but it’s the reality of what can happen when a MAC gets out of hand. And this was only a single change.
Can you imagine the impact when carrying out changes in bulk goes wrong to this degree? Maybe you don’t have to.
Note: This blog post isn’t intended to bash any admins, managers, or provisioners out there. For full disclosure, this used to be me. I made these mistakes. I documented them so you know you’re not alone ✊
Save For Later: When I was provisioning a coordinator, I made lots of mistakes.
How to automate moves, adds, and changes
There’s no way to automate MACs in the Teams Admin Center. So, we’re going to introduce you to Orto for Teams.
While its primary purpose may be auto-provisioning new users, all the productivity gains also apply to larger MACs too.
In some cases, those “smaller” changes are actually part of a job change. If you need to change the assignment of numbers, policies, licenses, queues, or teams, it’s a wider remit than it first seems.
Let’s say Ella Jackson is moving from the HR team in the UK to the People Services team in New York. To an outsider, it might seem like there’s not much difference. But, from your experience and from the request on your support ticket, you know there are a few changes that need to happen here.
Ella needs to be removed from the HR Management queue and added to the People Services queue. She needs a new US phone number instead of (or maybe as well as) her UK number.
She may also need new access to features like call recording or has no further need for voicemail. The point here is that change is required. And, more than likely, you will need to walk through these elements one by one.
In the manual world, this means time-consuming tasks and an average cost per ticket of around $44.57. But that’s if things go smoothly.
When calculating the time and cost of provisioning changes, we must also factor in the potential for error and what happens when escalation is needed.
Here, the cost per ticket rises to $78.83.
On average, an IT error equates to around four hours of lost productivity for the directly impacted user, too. This can quickly compound when users realize more than one error has occurred and more resolutions are needed.
These manual changes, prone to human error, add up.
| Number of Monthly Changes | Cost of Change Per Month | Cost of Change Per Year (ongoing) |
| 50 | $1,969.42 | $23,633.04 |
| 100 | $4,088.76 | $49,065.12 |
| 350 | $16,037.14 | $192,445.68 |
| 500 | $26,325.15 | $315,901.80 |
| 1000 | $54,869.11 | $658,429.32 |
Moves, adds, and changes make for pretty bleak reading…until you automate them.
In the automated world, using Orto for Teams, your time and effort is saved by user personas as the core of everything you do (relating to Teams user management anyway).
When you’ve created a persona, let’s say for the People Services team in the US, you’ve got a template of which every user labeled as “People Servies US” with the relevant policies, queues, teams, etc. automatically gets assigned when you assign them this persona.
As you can see in the screenshot above, you can choose whether they need voicemail, call hold, and any other policy in the Teams handbook.
Thanks to the user persona creation upfront, switching users from one department to the other is simple. You just change their underlying persona.
If you have a bunch of users, using a specific template, you can even conduct a bulk migration of sorts. Our bulk persona migration tool is used in different ways by different companies but is ideal for changes en masse.
There are no manual scripts and no copy and pasting so the change or error is as near to zero as possible.
Conclusion: automate your moves, adds, and changes for productivity and peace of mind
Sure, some changes are just a few clicks. For the most part, these are fine. You’ve checked off that task and the user got what they needed (or what they thought they needed).
But if you’ve read this far, the story of Danny the IT admin has happened to you before. When I was a provisioning co-ordinator, I was mortified with the damage one erroneous license assignment could cause. Or how by deleting the wrong phone number in the wrong place could cause a business to run at a loss for the day.
When such responsibility is in your hands, or you’re responsible for the team carrying out such activities, it pays (literally) to protect yourself from manual human error.
Orto for Teams is designed to save you time, money, and effort when provisioning users on Microsoft Teams.
Want to see how it works?
