Modern MSPs Don’t Find Success Hiring More Hands. They Design Better Systems

As service desks buckle under hybrid estates and tighter margins, some managed service providers are rewriting their operating models rather than hiring more hands. Brisbane-based Mangano IT is one of them, rebuilding routine workflows on the ConnectWise Asio® platform and ConnectWise RPA™, and reporting sharp gains in speed, accuracy and transparency.

“ConnectWise Asio is the backbone,” Managing Director Paul Mangano said. “Using ConnectWise PSA™, RMM™, and RPA on the platform is what lets us run bots, track activity, and keep everything consistent.”

From clever scripts to a repeatable system

Mangano’s team began by automating high-volume onboarding and offboarding tasks, then stepped back to template the work so any engineer could contribute safely. “We didn’t really template anything,” one engineer from the company, said. “But then we realised, if we’re going to get the team to help, we need to be able to say, ‘Here’s a template. Here’s something you can use.’” The shift formalised logging, tokenisation and scripting as shared standards.

The payoff arrived fast. In July alone, automated offboarding processed 55 requests and saved more than 165 technician hours. “It’s all streamlined, all template-based,” Mangano said. “Logging, notes, the way it runs—it’s all standardised now.”

Guardrails for speed

Speed without control is risky at scale, so the team introduced lightweight change management: junior engineers can propose updates while administrators retain oversight. “We’ve implemented change management for any deployment now… Junior engineers can submit changes, and it flags all the admins,” Mangano said.

That mattered when the wrong user account was offboarded due to a copy-paste error  from the customer. Because every action was logged and reversible, the team traced and rolled back quickly, which underlines why observability and reversibility sit alongside automation. “There’s always a risk… but it’s easily revertible. You just run the same bots in reverse.”

Where ConnectWise fits

Onboarding and offboarding are described as the proving ground. Mangano IT built client-agnostic workflows that cover identity changes, group membership, licence provisioning and revocation, mailbox conversion, Active Directory sync, and MFA/session shutdowns. “We use the same bots for onboarding and offboarding,” Mangano said. “They’re multifunctional—add, remove, convert, revoke. It’s all built into the workflow.” Authentication is handled via Azure Key Vault to keep tokenisation secure.

This meant that onboarding time was reduced by up to 75 per cent, from about 60 minutes to under 15, while offboarding accelerated by up to 90 per cent, finishing in as little as five minutes. The organisation calls out “zero-touch automation” and improved auditability across hybrid and cloud environments.

Measurement was also critical. Mangano’s team surfaced bot runs, time saved and ticket reduction on a BrightGauge dashboard to keep leaders focused on outcomes rather than activity. In the same period that automation saved 165+ technician hours, the ticket backlog was halved within three weeks, with an additional 20 per cent reduction projected. Those gains, the documents argue, created capacity without adding headcount.

Beyond metrics, there was a message reset after the business lost a long-standing client to what it described as a “more modern” MSP experience. The lesson was not simply to automate more, but to explain the outcomes in terms that matter to executives: Reliability, traceability and speed, while proving them with real-time data.

AI at the front door—carefully

Now, AI is being piloted at the service desk front door, not as a replacement but as a coach. The company is looking to trial real-time voice analysis in Microsoft Teams to guide conversations and surface relevant runbooks, with a target of resolving around 30 per cent of tickets via non-technical frontline staff assisted by automation.

Overall, Mangano IT’s experience is an operating pattern that other MSPs can test: pick a backbone platform, standardise the common work, build in guardrails, and make outcomes visible. With ConnectWise Asio and RPA as a practical foundation, Mangano IT was able to move beyond ad-hoc scripts to a system that scales across clients.

For MSP leaders weighing their next hire versus their next system, Mangano IT’s experience sets a baseline: automate where risk and volume coincide; measure what matters; and build on a platform that makes both possible.