MSP Guide: Capture and Reuse Temporary Workarounds Efficiently

MSP knowledge bases (KBs) don’t always cover a particular problem, causing technicians to leverage temporary workarounds. Without documentation, these fixes disappear or become tribal knowledge, causing the formulation of redundant one-off solutions that stunt mean-time-to-repair (MTTR).

Strategies to add one-offs in MSP knowledge bases

Documenting temporary workarounds within internal documentation preserves them for reuse. This legitimizes using one-off solutions, aligning technicians on provisional SOPs until a permanent fix is formed.

📌 Use Cases: The following strategies are components of a documentation model that captures and contextualizes internal workaround processes. By effectively implementing these targeted strategies, MSPs can communicate temporary strategies clearly to keep technicians aligned.

📌 Prerequisites:

• Centralized knowledge base or documentation system
• Standardized template for workaround entries
• Documentation versioning
• Pre-defined periodic review schedule
• Team awareness and contribution norms

📌 Best practices summary:

Strategy #1: Clarify the purpose of a workaround in documentation

Incorporating hacks into documentation mixes them with standard fixes, making them undocumented liabilities. Given that, explicitly stating the purpose and scope of workarounds helps preserve temporary solutions, providing fast remediation without cluttering documentation.

Clearly mark workarounds in documentation

Tagging temporary fixes with labels (e.g., temporary until official fix) sets clear expectations for technicians and stakeholders. This clearly communicates that they aren’t part of an official fix and increases visibility for future deprecation procedures.

Provide context of use and scope of applicability

Describe the context and scope of workarounds in detail, including their applicable environments, devices, and prerequisites. Doing so directs fixes to the right problems they’re designed to solve, preventing misapplications and streamlining task handoffs.

Incorporate tags to represent expiration dates and pending reviews

Workarounds are only useful until a permanent solution is rolled out. Additionally, vendor patches, OS builds, and API behaviors shift over time, requiring periodic maintenance on workarounds.

Enforce good lifecycle management practices on temporary fixes by incorporating review date reminders and deprecation banners. This ensures that temporary fixes are consistently validated to catch drift and deprecated when a permanent solution is available.

Strategy #2: Use standard metadata templates in workaround documentation

Metadata provides technicians with visibility, context, and clarity regarding one-off fixes at a glance. Incorporating a well-defined, lightweight metadata table prevents misuse of temporary fixes by providing technicians with essential information on their application.

Additionally, metadata information transforms undocumented fixes into searchable, reusable assets, making workarounds traceable and audit-ready.

Sample metadata table for workaround documentation:

Strategy #3: Embed comments in code or scripts for better visibility

Consider embedding comments in workaround scripts to provide technicians with immediate visibility, reducing the risk of accidental misuse. Additionally, this helps retain details about the script if it mistakenly gets stripped of its metadata.

Comments carry a workaround script’s trail, stating its purpose, source, and validity. Without embedded comments, scripts can become orphaned, living on indefinitely within an environment, while potentially becoming a liability.

Sample comments in a PowerShell script:

Input the necessary metadata fields found in strategy #2 as comments to provide more insights regarding workaround scripts.

Strategy #4: Ensure workarounds are searchable inside an MSP’s knowledge base

When incidents occur, technicians don’t have the leisure to crawl through cluttered knowledge bases, especially when issues require urgent attention. Storing workarounds inside a centralized knowledge base consolidates them in a searchable storage.

Maintain a separate internal workaround documentation library inside your MSP knowledge base. To speed up workaround retrieval, consider adding identifiers stating conditions and scope (e.g., Widgets fix for Windows 11 endpoints).

Strategy #5: Schedule workaround reviews to spot errors in your knowledge base

Schedule reviews on workaround entries to verify if permanent fixes have already replaced them. Assign multiple section owners to tag workarounds as active, deprecated, or archived to avoid reintroducing outdated instructions back into production.

Run workaround reviews in KBs every quarter to ensure the validity of all workarounds inside it. Reviews shrink a KB’s technical debt while keeping codebases clean, helping technicians retrieve functional workarounds when needed.

Strategy #6: Closely collaborate with teams to improve your MSP knowledge base

During team meetings, include short discussions about future plans regarding workarounds and KBs. Lean on leads and technicians as a primary source of improvement ideas, as they have the first-hand insight it needs.

Institutionalizing cooperative brainstorming allows MSPs to capture team-wide insights instead of scattered tips. This helps increase workaround reuse rates and fix duplicate documentation, improving the quality of temporary solutions inside KBs.

Sample workaround documentation for MSPs

When a technician discovers a clever script, registry tweak, or temporary configuration, it can quickly disappear without proper documentation. A structured capture-and-review process transforms tribal knowledge into repeatable processes that improve service delivery.

The following outlines a sample workaround capture procedure for MSPs:

1. Documenting a workaround using a form or template. After discovering a workaround, technicians can input them into a form or template to incorporate them into an organization’s KB.
2. Tag and add entries into KBs. Tags and entries make workarounds easily retrievable and comparable. Add metadata to surface lifecycle signals like owner, review date, and versions to ensure their validity.
3. Quarter-end report lists active workarounds for review. Periodic reviews allow technicians to spot workarounds for deprecation. This reduces redundancy by retiring workarounds when a permanent fix is readily available.
4. Decide to retain, retire, or improve existing workarounds. Retire workarounds when a permanent fix is available. Retain or evolve temporary solutions to improve them into safer practices.
5. Share updates and new entries in team briefings. Communicate decisions to teams to keep them informed about changes. This keeps technicians aligned regarding documentation that they can leverage when remediating issues.

NinjaOne integration ideas to automate internal documentation

NinjaOne offers automation services MSPs can use to minimize manual intervention across multiple clients. Leverage custom fields, tagging, and knowledge base features to streamline workaround documentation at scale.

• Documentation tool. Create custom KBs to store workarounds and link them to specific devices, organizations, or roles. NinjaOne’s centralized documentation tool also enables easy sharing and supports documentation versioning.
• Policy-based automation. Once an issue is detected, automate endpoint remediation using permanent fixes and workarounds, helping prevent potential policy drifts.
• Custom fields. Leverage custom fields to input workaround metadata inside KBs to provide technicians with context when searching for related remediation procedures.

Incorporate temporary solutions into your MSP knowledge base for reuse

Workarounds are temporary strategies brought about by necessity, but when captured with clear context, they become safe, reusable assets. MSPs can leverage structured workaround documentation strategies to capture best-case hacks into KBs, minimizing their technical debt.

MSPs turn one-off fixes into searchable runbooks that accelerate resolution by standardizing metadata, embedding brief in-script notes, and enforcing reviews. Incorporate NinjaOne in documenting workarounds to seamlessly integrate them into your existing KB.

Related topics:

• What Is IT Knowledge Management?
• Understanding the importance of documentation for effective IT management
• Best IT Documentation Software in 2025