Guided work and HaloPSA color sync

Guided work ranks the open tickets of every technician so that one of them is always the ticket to work next. Color sync paints that ranking onto the tickets in HaloPSA, so a technician sees what to do from their ticket list. Technicians use the colors every day. An Administrator or a person with the Q-Director Configuration role switches the features on and tunes them.

Before you start: guided work and color sync are off until an administrator switches them on, so you see no colors in HaloPSA before then. Technicians need nothing beyond HaloPSA. Administrators need the Administrator role or the Q-Director Configuration role. The Dispatch Workflow Settings screen needs the Administrator role.

Color sync is a HaloPSA feature. Autotask and ConnectWise PSA have no ticket color, so on those PSAs QuantumOps ranks tickets the same way but paints nothing. See What works on each PSA.

How QuantumOps ranks a technician's tickets

QuantumOps looks at the open tickets assigned to each technician. A ticket is actionable when all of these are true:

• Its status is not one that your organization lists as waiting.
• It has no appointment that starts more than an hour from now. A tentative appointment counts here only while tentative holds reserve the technician's capacity, which they do unless your dispatcher workflow settings say otherwise.

QuantumOps gives every actionable ticket a work score and ranks the tickets from the highest score down. The score is a weighted average of six factors.

A higher weight makes that factor count for more in the ranking.

What the colors mean in HaloPSA

With color sync on, HaloPSA shows each ranked ticket's color on its row.

Each technician has one red ticket. If you turn off ExactlyOneRedPerAgent in the Guided Order Rules card, every ticket that ties for the top score is red and the yellow tickets start after the last red one. QuantumOps ranks and colors only the tickets that are assigned to a technician.

Work from the colors every day

1. Open your ticket list in HaloPSA. Each of your tickets carries a color.
2. Work the red ticket first. It is the one QuantumOps ranks highest for you.
3. Treat the yellow tickets as your shortlist for what comes after.
4. Leave green tickets alone. They return to the ranking when their status changes or their appointment is within the hour.
5. When you finish the red ticket, or change its status to one that waits, QuantumOps recolors your tickets at its next refresh and a new ticket turns red. A change can take a few minutes to show.
6. If you have to work a different ticket first, go ahead. The Ticket Dashboard asks you for a reason, and for a short note when the reason needs one, and records it for review, unless your organization turned the reason requirement off.

My Guided Queue and the red-ticket banner

On a ticket's Ticket Dashboard in HaloPSA, My Guided Queue lists up to ten of your tickets in ranked order. Each row shows the rank, the ticket number, the color and the score. A ticket you cannot act on yet shows WAIT in place of a rank.

If you open a ticket that is not your red ticket, a banner reads This is not the current red ticket. and names the ticket you should take. Choose a reason under it. A reason your organization marks as needing a note, such as Other, asks you for a short note before it is recorded. If your organization does not ask for a reason, the banner only names the ticket. QuantumOps records a work order override for a manager to review. See The Ticket Dashboard in HaloPSA and Override and feedback review.

Turn on guided work and color sync

1. Open Q-Director Settings (Q-Director Config in the sidebar) and choose the Dispatch & Scheduling tab.
2. In the Guided Work section, switch on Enable Guided Work to Zero.
3. Switch on Enable Halo Color Sync. Either switch builds the ranking. Color sync also writes it into HaloPSA.
4. Choose a Color palette, and check the settings below.
5. Select Save Changes.

The Dispatch Workflow Settings screen has the same switches, called Enable guided work to zero and Enable Halo color sync, plus Yellow Queue Size, Refresh Interval Minutes and the three weights. It has no palette choice. See Dispatch workflow and scheduling settings.

QuantumOps looks for queues to refresh about every five minutes, so a shorter Refresh Interval Minutes does not make colors update faster than that. In Q-Director Settings, Use recommended values in the Guided Work section fills Yellow Queue Size and Refresh Interval Minutes with the recommended figures. Nothing is saved until you select Save Changes.

Under the switches, the tab shows What the colors mean in Halo, a legend in the palette you have chosen.

Choose a palette

The Color palette list offers two sets:

• Muted (recommended) is softer and stays readable in HaloPSA's light and dark modes.
• Vivid (original) is the original bright set. It is hard to read in HaloPSA's dark mode.

Pick the one your technicians can read in the mode they use. A new palette recolors tickets at the next queue refresh. It is saved with Save Changes.

Choose which statuses count as waiting

By default, no status counts as waiting, so only an appointment more than an hour away turns a ticket green. To make a status wait, add its HaloPSA status id to the Actionability Rules card, as a list. Open it from the Advanced tab of Q-Director Settings, or from Advanced JSON Configuration on the Dispatch Workflow Settings screen.

{
  "NonActionableStatusIds": [ 4, 7 ]
}

Tickets in those statuses turn green and leave the ranking. The ids above are made up. Use the ids from your own HaloPSA statuses. To list statuses by name instead, add them to NonActionableReasonCodes, for example [ "Waiting on Customer" ]. A name matches a ticket's current HaloPSA status without regard to capital letters, so the same list works on every HaloPSA instance. If QuantumOps cannot read the status list from HaloPSA, the names match nothing until the next recalculation. The card is described in Dispatch workflow and scheduling settings.

Switch color sync off

Clear Enable Halo Color Sync and select Save Changes. QuantumOps stops changing colors. Colors it already set stay in HaloPSA. If Enable Guided Work to Zero stays on, the queues and My Guided Queue carry on without colors.

Related pages

• Dispatch workflow and scheduling settings holds the other dispatch settings and the JSON cards.
• The Ticket Dashboard in HaloPSA shows My Guided Queue and the red-ticket banner.
• What QuantumOps writes into HaloPSA lists the colors among everything QuantumOps writes there.