Mattermost Playbooks for Enterprise Workflows

Mattermost Playbooks are configurable checklists that power team workflows with automation and real-time messaging. At a high level, Playbooks help teams work through recurring workflows efficiently, making sure all important tasks are taken care of while keeping teams aligned.

Playbooks include configurable and pre-built templates, the ability to streamline repetitive tasks with automated triggers and actions, and integrations with popular tools technical and operational teams use every day, like GitHub, Jenkins, Jira, and ServiceNow. 

With analytics and retrospectives, teams can learn from each playbook run, taking a data-driven approach to process improvement.

While Playbooks can help all Mattermost users work more effectively, Mattermost Enterprise Edition includes several advanced features that make Playbooks even more powerful.

Mattermost Enterprise Edition: Advanced Playbooks features for enterprise customers

Granular permissions

By default, Playbooks settings are completely open. This allows all members to participate in runs, edit playbooks, view runs and playbooks, edit actions, and delete other users from runs, among other things. Mattermost Enterprise Edition customers seeking more control over who can create and edit playbooks and manage members can utilize granular permissions to restrict access.

Using granular permissions, administrators can:

• Create read-only playbooks, which other users can view but not edit or adjust membership
• Restrict who can create playbooks 
• Restrict who can convert private playbooks to public playbooks 
• Control who starts a run, so that only playbook administrators can start a run and that members are unable to start runs or edit playbooks

Task scheduling

Some workflows are more time-sensitive than others. Mattermost Enterprise Edition enables administrators to associate Playbooks tasks with deliverable dates to increase visibility into workloads and ensure every team member is accountable during a run.

When a user assigns a due date to a specific task, individuals responsible for the task will receive reminders in the Playbooks daily digest when the task is due today or is overdue. Once tasks are complete, they are removed from the daily digest reminders. Users also have the ability to update the list of assigned tasks using the /playbooks todo slash command.

Status updates

Want to make sure your team is aware of the run’s progress? Mattermost Enterprise Edition users can post status updates directly from the run channel. At the same time, they can also configure playbooks to automatically send reminders to post status updates.

When playbooks have defined broadcast channels, these updates are copied to those channels and appear as messages from the Playbooks bot. To keep teams aligned, the most recent status update appears on the right-hand sidebar of the run channel and also in the timeline.

Need to figure out where your team stands with a playbook run’s progress? Users can also request status updates to find out how the work is coming along. Similarly, users can opt to follow runs and playbooks to receive updates on when runs start and end as well as retrospectives at the end of each run. This functionality is particularly useful when users want to keep tabs on every occurrence of a specific workflow, like an outrage resolution playbook.

To help users keep track of runs, tasks, and statuses, Mattermost automatically sends a daily digest to relevant users via direct message each morning.

Learn more about Playbooks notifications and update capabilities.

Retrospectives

To continuously improve workflows, Mattermost Enterprise Edition users can publish retrospectives at the end of each playbook run for key stakeholders to review. These retrospectives help teams capture important event details, build reports, and learn from each run.

Worried you might forget to create a retrospective? Don’t be. Users can set reminders to fill out retrospectives after each run is finished so they’re automatically notified.

To write an accurate retrospective, users can consult the run timeline. Critical events — like owner changes, status updates, and task assignments — will appear automatically. Users also have the ability to add posts to the timeline using the post context menu. 

Metrics & reports

Enterprise Edition customers can access metrics and analytics that allow them to surface valuable insights and use them to improve processes. Once you enable retrospectives, you simply calibrate the specific metric or metrics you want to measure; after runs are finished, the output will automatically appear in the retrospective. 

Metrics can be based on numeric, time, or value inputs, and they can be edited at any time. For example, a software development team might want to track how many bugs were identified during a run. This metric would automatically appear in a retrospective; over time, teams can analyze these outputs to detect patterns and anomalies. 

Metrics appear in a dashboard that reports on each metric you’re measuring after every run. The dashboard shows the average value for all runs, the average value over the most recent 10 runs compared to the previous 10-run range, the value range for all runs, the target value, and the actual values chart for the last 10 runs. Users can apply a number of filters to surface key insights faster.

Learn more about metrics and reports.

Explore Mattermost Enterprise Edition today

In addition to supercharging Playbooks, Mattermost Enterprise Edition is full of features designed to help technical and operational teams work more productively.

Learn more about what’s inside Mattermost Enterprise Edition today.