Mastering mid-lifecycle changes with branching workflows

Beyond onboarding and offboarding, a user can go through a variety of changes. Promotions, department changes, intern to FTE, part-time to full-time roles all happen all the time. 

Although these are welcome changes, they can be a real pain to manage from an IT standpoint. Often, IT is the last to know about these mid-lifecycle changes, resulting in a constant game of catch-up. Updating access privileges, group memberships, and contact information for a fluctuating workforce is a complex and time-consuming challenge. 

This reactive approach not only hampers IT efficiency, but also creates security risks and hinges productivity across the organization.

Luckily, BetterCloud allows you to automate not only onboarding and offboarding processes, but can also pick up on mid-lifecycle changes instantly. 

And these mid-lifecycle workflows just got even more efficient with BetterCloud’s branching functionality.

Department change automation

Automatically update someone’s access and info based on their new department. 

How it works: Configure your workflow to take actions that correspond with the needs of your user’s new role.

Here’s an example of a workflow that updates profile information, group access, and app provisioning based on Org Unit (OU) membership updates:

In this workflow, users moved to the “Support” OU have Zendesk accounts generated for them, get added to the “Support” group, and their title and manager are updated in their Google account. Users moved to the “Sales” OU go through similar steps, but as applicable to the Sales team. 

Following this pattern, you could add a separate workflow branch for each OU your users might be moved to and add the actions that should be taken accordingly. Or you could mix it up and build your branches around group membership, title change, or department change.

Project assignment automation

Grant or remove access based on which projects people are working on. BetterCloud can also automatically provision necessary project-specific tools, like collaboration software or project management platforms.

How it works: When the user is added to a specific group, grant them access to what they need to work on the project

Here’s an example of a workflow that grants a user access to a calendar, a folder, and a Slack channel based on their project group:

In this workflow, users moved to the “Super Secret Project” group get certain folder permissions, calendar access, and are added to a new Slack channel, while users moved to the “Portland” group get similar updates for their project. Following this pattern, you could add a separate branch to your workflow for each group project whose access you want to automate.

Automatically provision or deprovision apps based on someone’s new role.

How it works: You can use a branching workflow to provision or deprovision apps as users are moved into and out of groups.

Here’s an example of a workflow that grants a user access to Hubspot when they’re moved to a “Hubspot” group and Jira when they’re moved to a “Jira” group:

Or for app deprovisioning, you could use the User Removed from Group event to detect when users are moved out of groups and then disable their corresponding accounts:

Ready to streamline your IT processes and eliminate the mid-lifecycle management headache? Discover how BetterCloud can automate these changes and boost your team’s efficiency. Schedule a demo today!

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