The Ultimate Coda Handbook for IT Teams

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The Ultimate Coda Handbook for IT Teams

The Ultimate Coda Handbook for IT Teams

Be a better business partner

How can Coda better serve your broader organization?

In my first IT job, I remember my manager telling me that if our team does nothing else this year, we should be to enable our surrounding teams to do their best work. For me that means making their lives easier by ensuring they have the tools they need to be successful, aren’t constrained or blocked by (our) process, and can do the first two securely.

If our IT team does nothing else this year, it should be to enable our surrounding teams to do their best work.

I’ve been around a lot of IT teams. And I’ve witnessed a number that don’t accomplish this. The primary reason for falling flat is that they’re either easily distracted by the next ask, or they’re bogged down by the number of requests coming their way. While it’s easy to know that there’s a problem, it’s hard to see the forest from the trees. It's not always clear how to get out reactive mode.

From what I’ve observed, to transform IT into a team that moves an organization forward starts with everyone being aligned.

The source of misalignment stems from not having the proper tooling in place. They live in a bunch of tools like ServiceNow, GSuite, Airtable, Asana, or others, but these tools don’t talk to each other and they house different types of information. None of these tools are a single source of truth, let alone a recipe for proactivity.

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Without one place to bring your strategy, execution, data, and teammates together, you are forced to fight an uphill battle to keep your team organized and aligned, which means you’re scrambling to connect the dots between your projects, information, and tools.

For most of the teams I’ve consulted, their reactivity is a byproduct of the tools they use and the systems they implement.

Enable your teams proactively with a team hub.

When an IT team enlists Oliver and me to help them transform their team and processes, the first step we take is making sure they have a single source of truth in Coda that they can rely on to bring everything together.

This single source of truth—or team hub—immediately unlocks the team’s bandwidth. Team hubs eliminate the need to piece together context from other apps, double check if projects are up-to-date, and use “middleware” like Google Sheets and Google Docs to join disparate data together. They let you manage your process end-to-end in one place, helping make more informed decisions, faster.

For example, one common scenario that I help a lot of enterprise teams set up is what I like to call

vendor renewal hubs⁠

. Vendor renewals follow the same process. But it’s typically pretty painful. Why? It requires intaking lots of data, sourcing and synthesizing feedback both internally and externally, performing due diligence on alternatives, gaining consensus among leaders, and much more. The process is inherently spread across dozens of tools and you can’t easily reference your past renewals because, well, it’s spread out across dozens of tools.

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Get started with the Vendor renewal hub

Vendor renewal hubs templatize the renewal process and bring all decision making criteria (usage data, qualitative surveys, etc.), communications (Slack messages, email threads), documents (contracts, vendor materials, etc.), and even the instructions on how to run a renewal into one place.

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Try the Vendor renewal hub template

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Team hubs organize and align IT teams. When you aren’t putting out a revolving door of fires, you can better support your stakeholders.

The reason we revolve implementations around a team hubs in Coda is because it lays the foundation for everything else. Not only does it connect IT teams and frees resources, but having a central hub for your procedures allows business partners to unblock themselves.

In my team hub, for example, my team maintains our IT support knowledge base, which acts as a first line of defense for our team. Instead of repeatedly answering the same questions, Codans are able to follow step-by-step procedures on software set up, troubleshooting, working with outside vendors, and more.

Our team hub helps us be more efficient so we can spend more time tackling bigger challenges that face our company and unblock our stakeholders so they can get back to their jobs.

By connecting workstreams and bringing information into one place, Coda helps you accomplish more, stop being reactive, and be a better business partner.

Need some inspiration?

Below are a few templates that I either personally use or have helped set up at customer accounts.

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Template: Support Ticketing

For smaller to medium sized teams, ticketing platforms are hassle, plus Slack alone is chaotic and difficult to track. Coda makes for a great ticketing system, especially when you leverage integrations to automate repetitive tasks.

This template also walks you through creating a Zapier Zap to create tickets automatically within an #it-help channel!

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Try the Support Ticketing template

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Template: IT Asset Management

Using Sheets or Excel to manage inventory leads to tons of inconsistencies. By standardizing your asset properties and using buttons, you minimize mistakes made while tracking changes. Additionally, because Coda keeps activity history for all rows, you have an audit log to see how devices moved around and who made what changes.

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Try the IT Asset Management template

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Template: Automate Okta Workflows

Ever wish you could do more in Okta? By connecting Coda and Okta, you can customize workflows and automations that save you time.

This template is full of very real use cases we use internally to help save time, like quickly assigning group access in bulk, or setting a time bound group membership.

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Try the 'Automate Okta Workflows' template

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Template: Support knowledge base

Build out your IT support knowledge base in Coda. Use this template to write up your company processes in an easily searchable Coda table. Additionally, this template is set up to use AI to auto-tag help articles so that teammates can effortlessly sort and filter through content.

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Try the Support knowledge base

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