A vertical pack is ordinary support with three things bolted on: a calendar that changes
what "urgent" means, a boundary the desk must not cross, and a regulator with opinions
about data. Establish all three first.
1. The calendar first, always. Every one of these verticals has a period where the stakes
change — a filing deadline, a court date, an audit, a month-end close. In it, two
regimes apply: a change freeze (no discretionary maintenance, migrations or upgrades;
emergencies only, with the client's explicit sign-off) and a raised urgency floor (a
fault that's a P3 in a quiet week is a P1 the day before a deadline). When impact is
unclear, ask when their next deadline is — the most useful question in these accounts.
2. Pull context against it. Review this client's app history — seasonal failures recur
annually with known fixes — and check their documentation for the stack, hosting
provider, vendor contracts and where the compliance document lives. Say what you could
not verify: a regulated client with no documented compliance plan is itself a flag for
the account owner.
3. Triage by blast radius times calendar, not blast radius alone: a firm-wide outage in
season is top severity and immediate dispatch; the same fault for one user out of
season is normal work.
4. Hold the boundary. The environment is the desk's: network path, workstation,
peripherals, a security agent quarantining a freshly-updated binary. The client's
professional work is not — filings, case content, clinical decisions, financial
positions. Say so plainly rather than helping and hoping. Application defects, data
corruption and hosting faults are vendor territory: escalate with the case number, the
deadline stated in it, and a follow-up cadence. Never operate on the application's data
path outside vendor procedure, and never improvise a rollback of a mid-season update.
5. The regulator's data rules are not optional. Never paste regulated identifiers or
client content into tickets — no identity numbers, no record contents, no screenshots
of open work; reference by account or portal ID where unavoidable. Check
security-control changes against the client's compliance document and flag its owner
when they diverge; the MSP is often named in it. A suspected compromise means contain,
record facts, flag the compliance owner at once — regulatory notification is theirs.
Never give legal or regulatory advice.
6. Verification is the professional running their real workflow, not a component
responding. Then note it (apply the PSA Note Discipline base skill), scrubbed of
regulated data: app and versions, scope, calendar context, verbatim error, branch,
vendor case, any compliance flag, and how it was verified.
Layer this on the LOB Application Framework
(troubleshooting-playbooks/lob-application-framework), and apply the Write Guardrails base
skill before anything that sends, closes or changes state.
Magic Library