By
El Copeland
August 21, 2024
•
20 min read
Business
Tutorials
Choosing the Right Ticket Status Colors in HaloPSA
Have you implemented unique colors for your Ticket Statuses in HaloPSA?
Coloring these Statuses adds a great Quality of Life to your Agents working tickets. Often, it is treated as a nice-to-have or “let’s just make it look pretty,” which are fine if it works for you. However, we invite you to imagine instead with us: what if you could leverage symbolic colors that guide an Agent through your defined ticket process. What if you could implement that in a reasonable way?
So, to help lessen that decision fatigue for you since we know you’re busy customizing every other setting in HaloPSA as well, here is the framework that Rising Tide uses to approach customizing these settings to help you quickly and sensibly label your Ticket Statuses. In a future article, we’ll tackle Ticket Action color codes; however, the concepts will generally remain the same.
Laying out the Ticket Status Colors Framework
Before we jump into coloring statuses, let’s start by defining a ticket’s lifecycle according to how your Agents need to allocate their attention to those tickets, whether that is dictated by standard professionalism or ensuring SLAs are kept. For the sake of this conversation, we are going to address these ticket attention phases with the segments: Normal Attention, Elevated Attention, or Inert Attention.
Normal Attention
Ideally, your Agents receive a ticket and all things are “Go,” they have everything they need to start working, and then Close the ticket when they've successfully completed the task and can rest on their laurels (or move on to the next ticket!).
We recommend all Normal Attention tickets to be assigned “cool colors” like greens, blues, and purples. (And not cool because we think they’re rad, cool as opposed to warm colors, more information here on color theory) Statuses like New and In Progress generally belong here. We have the ticket, everything is going as planned. What a perfect, serene world. Peaceful, isn’t it?
Unfortunately, that’s not the reality in most of our businesses! What happens when tickets require extra attention or action to ensure their timely completion?
Elevated Attention
Here in Elevated Attention is where we see statuses like Escalated, Pending Approval, or Reopened: tickets that we need to be actively thinking about and revisiting, especially ones that are keeping our SLA clock running. To inspire action and increase visibility, we’re using warm, fiery colors like Orange, Red, and Yellow.
What if there is a ticket where we cannot take immediate action, or it doesn’t warrant it? That’s our last category: Inert Attention.
Inert Attention
There will be times when our tickets are active but there is literally nothing we can do but wait. The SLA clock isn’t running, so we don’t need to worry about taking action on these just yet: statuses like Waiting on Client or Waiting on Vendor. We recommend using greys to signify these statuses’ inactive character.
In general, we recommend you set up HaloPSA to do most of the status setting and remembering to move tasks in and out of statuses, especially Inert-type statuses. Specifically, when setting up these Inert Attention statuses in HaloPSA, be sure to build those Ticket Statuses, Ticket Type Settings, and your related Workflows so when a ticket enters or exits an Inert status, it automatically puts the ticket on or removes it from SLA hold. You can see examples of these settings in the screen captures below.
Some examples of this recommendation in action could be:
- Setting a Waiting on Client ticket to Attention Required when a customer replies to an email
- Setting a Waiting on Vendor ticket to Attention Required when a Supplier updates
- Setting a ticket to Scheduled upon creating an Appointment (Ticket Type Settings: Status after user appointment booking (resource booking), or Status after Agent creates appointment)
- Automatically setting Waiting on Client tickets to Closed after a certain number of hours with no reply according to SLA rules you set.
Ticket Status Colors Framework in Action
With all of these ideas in mind, we suggest as you approach customizing each ticket status, you ask:
What type of Attention do I expect of my team at this status: Normal, Elevated, or Inert?
When you have that answer, choose a color from the suggested family. Remember that color for other statuses you may have for other Ticket Types so it stays consistent regardless of what Area your Agent is operating from!
Here are some examples for what we specifically recommend to Rising Tide Customers. You will likely not need all of them, depending on your MSP’s needs:
Normal Attention
- Brand New/Assigned (Waiting on You): Green — Ticket is newly created and waiting for initial action. Green indicates readiness to start and clear action needed.
- Claimed/Work in Progress: Blue — Ticket is actively being addressed towards resolution. Blue symbolizes confidence in ongoing work and progress.
- We’d be remiss if we didn’t specifically call out that at Rising Tide we recommend that your Agents should not be "Claiming" tickets until they're ready to work on them.
- Closed: Black — The ticket has been fully resolved and all necessary actions are completed. Black signifies completion and closure of the ticket.
Elevated Attention
- Pending Approval: Yellow — Awaiting authorization or approval to proceed. Yellow is high-visibility and unique to call attention to follow up that may be necessary.
- Escalated: Orange — Moved to a higher level of support due to complexity or urgency. Orange highlights urgency and attention required.
- Customer Updated/Vendor Updated/Approver Updated: Orange— Orange is used to indicate recent release from a paused status like Waiting on Customer or Waiting on Vendor and subsequent re-instating of the current SLA timer, if applicable.
- Attention Required: Orange — Elevated attention needed following removal from an SLA hold.
- Reopened: Red — Previously closed/resolved ticket is active again due to additional issues or dissatisfaction. Red indicates a critical reactivation that needs immediate reassessment.
Inert Attention
- Waiting on Client: Grey — Progress on the ticket is paused because it requires input or action from the client. Grey suggests inactivity from the MSP’s side, waiting on external action.
- Waiting on Vendor/Waiting on Parts: Grey — Progress on the ticket is halted while waiting for action or information from an external vendor. Similar to waiting on client but specific to external vendors.
- Scheduled: Purple — Scheduled could also technically be included in the Normal category, hence the cool purple. Denotes a paused status where work is planned, but no active work is required.
- Resolved: Teal — Similar to Scheduled, Resolved straddles the Normal category as well. The issue within the ticket has been addressed, awaiting final closure or verification from the requester. Teal is a calm yet upbeat color indicating resolution but awaiting final closure.
As with most rules, there are going to be times when items cross between phases, or you may operate differently and not define a ticket status the same way we did here.
Maybe you have some color-blind technicians on staff and decide to use completely different colors completely or none at all. (If you do want to create a color-blind friendly palette, here’s a great resource.)
Maybe you want to choose different values (light or dark) within a certain family than what Halo provides.
Good! Break our rules. They're just here to help you decide what you do or don't actually want.
Our main recommendation is that you use your best judgement on what is right for your team and just be consistent which sometimes means keeping it simple. And let us know what you ended up doing, you may help someone else. Happy customizing!
As Partner and Business Consultant at Rising Tide, I help organizations align culture with efficiency, bridging the gap between strategy and the everyday systems that make it work. I’ve spent my career leading diverse, cross-functional teams and building communities where people actually want to learn and collaborate. With roots in technology, education, user experience & design, and project management, I specialize in turning complex ideas into clear, actionable plans that keep both people and projects thriving.
Outside of work, you’ll usually find me weight-training, gardening, or rewatching Doctor Who with a cat in my lap.
See some more of our most recent posts...
Rising Tide Book Club: Think Naked - Week 2
In Chapter 2 of Think Naked, Marco Marsan argues that adults don’t lose creativity: they’re conditioned out of it. This Rising Tide book club discussion explores fear, conformity, unexamined rules, and why real learning requires play, safety, and curiosity in modern organizations.
Read post
About this Series
This discussion guide is part of Rising Tide’s Winter 2026 book club, where we’re reading Think Naked by Marco Marsan.
If you’re just joining us, here are a few pages you’ll likely benefit from:
- Book Clubs, Conversations, and Curiosity for why we started a book club for a technical team here
Chapter Summary
“If you want to be more creative, stay in part a child, with the creativity and invention that characterizes children before they are deformed by adult society” - Jean Piaget
In Chapter 2, You Lost Your Marbles, Marco Marsan explores how people don’t simply “grow out” of creativity — they are systematically conditioned out of it. The chapter argues that over time, fear, rigid rules, institutional norms, and social conformity slowly strip away curiosity, playfulness, and experimentation.
Marsan frames this loss through several forces:
- Fear: mistakes become costly as adults (financially, socially, professionally)
- Senseless rules: norms persist long after their original context or usefulness
- Institutionalized regurgitation: being rewarded for having the “right answer” rather than learning how to think
- Tough-it-out culture: endurance replaces reflection
- Numbness: accumulated stress and responsibility dull engagement
The chapter opens with a consulting story where a leader dismisses Marsan outright, using it as a framing device to explore how organizations often reject discomfort, challenge, and unconventional thinking — even when they claim to want innovation.
Discussion Questions
Use these open-ended prompts to guide reflection and conversation. Remember, there are no right answers!
- What does “losing your marbles” mean to you — and what might you have lost that still matters?
- 'Lose Your Marbles' Saying - Meaning & Context
- Rather than meaning “you’ve gone crazy,” the group explored the older meaning: marbles as something valuable children possessed — and something adults may have lost, not gained, over time.
- Where have fear or consequences made curiosity feel unsafe? How do power and authority shape how you show up creatively?
- How often do you ask why a rule exists, rather than whether you’re allowed to challenge it?
- Where have institutions (school, work, industry norms) rewarded compliance over thinking?
- What would play look like in your work if you weren’t worried about being wrong?
Rising Tide Input for your Consideration
- Your brain is capable of great creativity and capacity. How you use it matters. Here is some research behind some of the concepts Marsan mentions.
- Creativity and Learning require play — and play requires safety.
- We discussed Montessori education, language learning, or professional growth, the group emphasized that playfulness, repetition, and “looking silly” are critical to learning and are exactly what adults are trained to avoid.
- Conformity isn’t safety, it’s a creativity suppressor.
- The group referenced classic psychology experiments (Stanford Prison Experiment, Milgram Experiment) to explore how authority, group pressure, and institutional roles can override personal judgment and moral reasoning. Stanford prison experiment - Wikipedia
- Dead Poets Society - Conformity Scene (1989) HD w/ Subtitles
- https://youtu.be/GDWAKvQemlU?si=AVbkNGLEhC8vn7KV
- Organizational Culture and the 5 Monkeys Experiment | Intersol
- Are rules ever useful?
- Rules are not inherently bad, but we propose that unexamined rules are dangerous. There are rules that deliver shared value and coordination, but there are also rules that persist simply because “that’s how it’s done”
- A recurring Rising Tide pattern emerged: looking for the rule beneath the rule (the underlying reason a rule exists) rather than accepting it at face value.
- As Marsan suggests, “Any Rule represents, at best, the latest thinking on a subject,” but we also considered that a rule represents what was left over from an unfinished discussion, and not even the best answer. It just reflects the last time someone argued about something and not a timeless truth.
- Rules are not inherently bad, but we propose that unexamined rules are dangerous. There are rules that deliver shared value and coordination, but there are also rules that persist simply because “that’s how it’s done”
- Learning is experiential, not transactional.
- We discussed how conformity, rote memorization, and “teaching for the test” suppress critical thinking and actual learning in many modern educational systems.
- True learning involves play, repetition, discomfort, and curiosity, all of which feel inefficient or risky in adult systems optimized for output.
About Rising Tide and our Book Club
Rising Tide helps MSPs and service-focused teams build better systems: the kind that align people with purpose.
Every Friday at 9:30 AM ET, we host Rising Tide Fridays as an open conversation for MSP owners, consultants, and service professionals who want to grow both professionally, technically, and emotionally. In Winter/Spring 2026, we’re walking through Think Naked.
If that sounds like your kind of crowd, reach out to partners@risingtidegroup.net for the Teams link. Bring your coffee and curiosity…no prep required.
Rising Tide Book Club: Think Naked - Week 1
In Rising Tide’s Winter 2026 Book Club, we explore Think Naked by Marco Marsan and challenge the idea that creativity fades with age. Instead, we examine how risk, labels, and permission shape curiosity — and what it looks like to think more like a kid in modern technical work.
Read post
About this Series
This discussion guide is part of Rising Tide’s Winter 2026 book club, where we’re reading Think Naked by Marco Marsan.
If you’re just joining us, here are a few pages you’ll likely benefit from:
- Book Clubs, Conversations, and Curiosity for why we started a book club for a technical team here
Chapter Summary
In the introduction and first chapter, Marco Marsan proposes to the readers that creativity is not lost as we age — it is trained out of us. He cites research suggesting that young children test at very high “genius” or creative problem-solving levels, and that this capacity sharply declines by adulthood.
To return to this childlike, “genius” mindset, Marsan introduces five “rules” that mirror how children naturally engage with problems:
- Wear your cape (be fearless)
- Blockbuster (question defaults and conventions)
- Look at Your Neighbor’s Paper (learn by copying and remixing)
- Show-N-Tell (learn publicly and collaboratively)
- I’m the boss of me (take ownership and agency)
Discussion Questions
Use these open-ended prompts to guide reflection and conversation. Remember, there are no right answers!
- What did you agree with in these chapters?
- What did you disagree with in these chapters?
- Do you agree that creativity declines because of conditioning rather than capability? Why or why not?
- Who or what defines a genius?
- Do any of the five lessons intrigue you more than the others? Which of the five principles feels most uncomfortable to you right now?
- Where do you avoid experimentation because the cost of being wrong feels too high?
- Where in your work do you default to “this is how it’s always been done”?
- What would “thinking more like a kid” actually look like in one small, real decision this week?
Rising Tide Input for your Consideration
- What causes us to lose our creativity?
- The team proposed that people don’t lose creativity as they age, but rather they close off the permission rather than the capability because creativity becomes risky. As adults, mistakes have consequences: reputational, financial, professional. Most environments reward predictability over curiosity, so people adapt accordingly.
- Are children actually ‘geniuses’?
- Evidence that children become less creative over time (and how to fix it) - Idea to Value
- As a team, we felt that the label “genius,” isn’t particularly useful. It’s poorly defined, and even more poorly measured. What matters is not intelligence labels, but how people approach problems: curiosity, iteration, and willingness to engage with uncertainty.
- In fact, as a team we consistently seem to pushback on: Labels (“genius,” “best practice,” or “industry standard”), Claims without sources, and Metrics without definitions.
- Children also don’t ask if they’re allowed to participate, they assume they are. Adults often operate transactionally, constantly checking for permission. That hesitation suppresses experimentation and ownership.
- How does technology factor into creativity loss?
- Convenience is a trade. Offloading is good if the saved energy is reinvested into higher-order problem-solving. As a result, technology can either dull skills or enable deeper thinking depending on how we use it as a tool.
- Automation is welcomed after understanding exists. Technology should support people who know why, not replace them.
About Rising Tide and our Book Club
Rising Tide helps MSPs and service-focused teams build better systems: the kind that align people with purpose.
Every Friday at 9:30 AM ET, we host Rising Tide Fridays as an open conversation for MSP owners, consultants, and service professionals who want to grow both professionally, technically, and emotionally. In Winter/Spring 2026, we’re walking through Think Naked.
If that sounds like your kind of crowd, reach out to partners@risingtidegroup.net for the Teams link. Bring your coffee and curiosity…no prep required.
Chapter-by-Chapter Discussion Questions for The Go-Giver by Bob Burg: Chapter Fourteen: The Go-Giver
Chapter 14 ties The Go-Giver up neatly, and our team's conversation unpacked whether or not Joe’s ending was a success, and if it was relatable to anyone else.
Read post
About this Series
This discussion guide is part of Rising Tide’s Fall 2025 book club, where we’re reading The Go-Giver by Bob Burg and John David Mann.
If you’re just joining us, here are a few pages you’ll likely benefit from:
- Chapter One – The Go-Getter for an introduction on how to use these Discussion Questions
- Book Clubs, Conversations, and Curiosity for why we started a book club for a technical team here
Chapter Summary
In the final chapter of The Go-Giver, we meet Claire, who is on her way to meet the partners behind an amazingly (even stratospherically) successful new business: Rachel’s Famous Coffee. Chapter 14 ties up the story of The Go-Giver in a neat little bow, showcasing the stratospheric success possible, and encouraging us to share the secret with others along the way.
Discussion Questions
Use these open-ended prompts to guide reflection and conversation. Remember, there are no right answers!
- Joe ends the book in a completely different role than he started. Did that feel like success to you?
- How has your own definition of success changed over time?
- How do you tell the difference between quitting, failing, and evolving? Would this ending feel different if Joe were less financially secure?
- What did you learn from this book? What do you think your key takeaway will be?
Rising Tide Input for your Consideration
- Joe didn’t land the sale, he completely changed his trajectory. What does that mean for you? Sometimes success isn’t what we imagine or set out to accomplish, sometimes it’s adjacent.
- Joe isn’t keeping the secret or the process to himself, he’s actively sharing it with others and using the same framework Pindar gave him.
- As a team, we didn’t really like this book and wouldn’t recommend it to peers who already have practical experience in business or leadership.
- The parable format wasn’t great for our team. It was a good basic overview, but it didn’t go as deep as we felt some of these concepts deserved. While we get that it’s a book with a story that needed to be simplified to get the author’s key ideas across, seven days isn’t enough time for meaningful personal or professional change, and we felt the timeline and simplicity undercut the book’s credibility. Many felt the book oversold its lesson without adequately showing how it applies in complex, real-world situations, added to the fact that since Joe doesn’t apply the lessons over time and he’s rewarded through proximity to power, it made the ending feel uncomfortably like access solves everything.
- The main character wasn’t relatable or aspirational. The team generally struggled with Joe! He started unlikable and never quite crossed into someone the team wanted to root for or become, in fact, as a result, the story ended up feeling like it was more about “who you know.” and being in the right place at the right time. While generosity mattered, only once the right people were involved, which ignores how uneven access to networks really is.
- There are possibly better books out there that communicate similar ideas more effectively. Here are a few of our favorites:
- We hope you’ll join us in 2026 for our next book: Think Naked: Childlike Brilliance in the Rough Adult World by Peter Lloyd Marco Marsan | Goodreads. Get a copy of the book and mark your calendar for January 09, 2026 to talk through the cover and reading plan.
About Rising Tide and our Book Club
Rising Tide helps MSPs and service-focused teams build better systems: the kind that align people with purpose.
Every Friday at 9:30 AM ET, we host Rising Tide Fridays as an open conversation for MSP owners, consultants, and service professionals who want to grow both professionally, technically, and emotionally. Our book for 2026 Quarter 1 is Think Naked: Childlike Brilliance in the Rough Adult World by Marco Marsan.
If that sounds like your kind of crowd, reach out to partners@risingtidegroup.net for the Teams link.
Bring your coffee and curiosity…no prep required.