When I think back on the several workplaces i’ve worked at and how they made created new user accounts in their environment, i’m always reminded of the countless hours new user accounts would take to set up. Some organisations would have set documentation to follow, involving seemingly endless clicks in ADUC, adding security and distribution groups, modifying proxy addresses, and the scope to make mistakes was always quite high!

When I started at Xero, things weren’t much different. Back in 2013 we had new starter and leaver processes, but they were loosely followed and varied from region to region. New users would take roughly 15-20 minutes to set up each on average… and for me that was just too long. So instead of just tolerating it, I embraced Xero’s “challenge the norm” culture and did something about it!

And Green Parrot was born! Named after a meal of epic proportions in my first week at Xero while in Wellington, NZ, Green Parrot is a New User Provisioning Tool written entirely in Powershell.

Information about our new users is submitted to us via our IT Ticketing System. Our IT staff then copy the relevant information into the program’s fields, verify attributes such as username (ensuring it’s <20 chars), manager (ensuring it matches a value in AD), and even checking our existing AD structure for a duplicate account in case a user has left or two users have the same name.

Once all the fields have been verified the user can be created in under 30 seconds! Logic has been built in to add Security and Distribution groups based on location, title and department, saving our IT guys from having to change the AD account after creation.

The new starter’s password is then emailed to the ticket entry in our ticketing system and also displayed in the program. Nice!

(some fields have been blanked out for Xero’s privacy!)