MSPs face pressure to accept new projects, but neglecting a proper workload assessment risks missed deadlines, technician burnout, and client dissatisfaction.
This guide provides a clear framework for evaluating your team’s capacity, enabling you to take on new work confidently while maintaining service quality.
Steps to evaluating technician capacity
Proactive capacity planning prevents MSPs from overcommitting their teams.
📌 Use cases: Integrate capacity checks into your project intake process, before finalizing timelines. This workload assessment utilizes real-time data, such as active tickets and current utilization, to validate team bandwidth, ensuring that new projects align with actual availability.
📌 Prerequisites: An accurate assessment requires:
- Data access: Live feeds from PSA/RMM tools on tickets, projects, and SLAs.
- Utilization benchmarks: A clear target (for example, 70-80% max) for workload capacity.
- A tracking tool: A centralized dashboard in Excel, Power BI, or your PSA.
- Process alignment: Agreement that sales requires a green light from service leads based on this data.
If you’re ready to build your evaluation framework, follow the steps below.
Step 1: Establish clear utilization benchmarks
Effective workload capacity planning begins by defining “full capacity” using historical data from your PSA/RMM tools. This creates a baseline model to guide project decisions.
Establish these three key metrics:
- Average Tickets Resolved: The number of tickets handled per technician monthly, indicating routine support demand
- Average Project Hours Available: The weekly hours free for project work after accounting for support and administrative tasks
- Healthy Utilization Threshold: A target range (such as 70-80%) for productive work, preserving time for breaks and unexpected issues
This baseline model enables an objective workload assessment. The next step is to compare real-time data against these benchmarks to make informed decisions.
Step 2: Analyze current technician capacity
This step involves measuring your team’s real-time workload against established benchmarks to understand true availability.
Pull live data from your PSA/RMM platforms to review three key areas:
- Open and Active Tickets: The volume and complexity of current tickets per technician
- Ongoing Project Hours: Hours already committed to active projects
- Escalations and Repeat Issues: Indicators of hidden workload and systemic inefficiencies
This analysis provides an objective, dashboard view of who is “Available,” “At Risk,” or “Over-Utilized,” enabling data-driven workload capacity decisions for new projects.
Step 3: Forecast upcoming capacity
Accurate workload assessment requires anticipating future demands, not just reviewing the present.
This proactive forecast, typically spanning 4-6 weeks, integrates scheduled events that impact availability:
- Planned Absences: Account for holidays and vacations.
- Scheduled Initiatives: Include recurring work like Windows 11 patch cycles or client upgrades.
- Anticipated Spikes: Plan for known events such as new client onboarding.
It prevents assigning new work to technicians whose capacity is already committed to upcoming tasks, moving your capacity planning from reactive to strategic.
The result is a clear forward-looking view of true availability, enabling realistic scheduling and preventing overcommitment.
Step 4: Align Projects With Available Capacity
This crucial step translates your capacity data into an actionable go/no-go decision.
Before formally accepting new work, match the project’s requirements against your team’s forecasted availability. Doing so involves comparing required hours and skills with available technician bandwidth.
If capacity is limited, adjust the project start date or explore redistributing existing tasks and automating repetitive processes to free up hours.
Implement a mandatory project intake checklist that requires workload sign-off from service leadership. This will ensure that every new commitment is backed by verified workload capacity, protecting your team and service quality.
Step 5: Communicate Capacity in Business Terms
To secure approval from executives or set clear expectations with clients, you must express workload assessment findings in terms of impact and resources. Avoid technical jargon and instead use clear, quantitative statements that focus on outcomes:
- State the facts clearly: Present direct comparisons, such as “This new 200-hour project exceeds our current available capacity of 120 hours for the requested timeline.”
- Outline the choices: Define the concrete options available. For example, “To meet the Q1 deadline, we must either approve additional headcount or formally defer a lower-priority existing project.”
The outcome is a concise “workload-to-project fit” report. This one-page document summarizes the capacity analysis, presents the available options and their implications, turning your capacity planning data into a tool for strategic decision-making.
Automate your workload assessment framework
Manual checks are inconsistent; automate your workload assessment with this reproducible procedure.
Step-by-step procedure:
- Export your ticket data from your PSA or RMM tool.
- Navigate to the reporting section of your PSA or RMM tool.
- Create a report that exports all active tickets.
- Ensure to include the Technician and Status columns.
- Export the report as a Tickets.csv file to a known folder.
- Run the PowerShell analysis script.
- Open PowerShell (Admin).
- Use the cd command to navigate to the folder containing the Tickets.csv file (for example, cd C:\Users\YourName\Desktop).
- Copy and paste the following script directly into the PowerShell window:
| $Data = Import-Csv “Tickets.csv” $Report = $Data | Group-Object Technician | ForEach-Object { [PSCustomObject]@{ Technician = $_.Name OpenTickets = ($_.Group | Where-Object {$_.Status -eq “Open”}).Count } } $Report | Export-Csv “Technician_Load.csv” -NoTypeInformation Write-Host “Workload report generated: Technician_Load.csv” -ForegroundColor Green |
- After executing the script, a new file called Technician_Load.csv will be created.
- Visualize the results.
- Open the generated Technician_Load.csv file in Microsoft Excel.
- Select the data and create a simple bar chart from the Insert menu to visualize the distribution of open tickets across your team.
Integrating this 5-minute script into your weekly pre-planning routine ensures your workload capacity planning is consistently based on real data, leading to more realistic project commitments.
5 ways RMM tools streamline technician workload assessment
RMM (Remote Monitoring and Management) platforms like NinjaOne provide critical data to replace guesswork with metrics in workload planning. Here’s how they help:
Automate technician-specific reporting
RMM tools automatically track and report ticket volume and SLA compliance per technician, giving an instant view of individual workload and performance.
Quantify automation’s impact
They show how many alerts were resolved automatically versus manually, highlighting efficiency gains and proving where automation frees up capacity.
Visualize capacity on dashboards
Live dashboards display team utilization and workload distribution at a glance, making it easy to spot who is “Available,” “At Risk,” or “Over-Utilized.”
Centralize project intake workflows
Integrated documentation features (like NinjaOne Docs) host intake checklists and workload-fit reports, ensuring capacity review is a mandatory step before project approval.
Enable proactive alerting
Configure alerts to notify managers when a technician’s utilization exceeds healthy thresholds, allowing for intervention before burnout occurs.
Ready to replace guesswork with workload metrics? NinjaOne tracks ticket/SLA per tech, quantifies automation wins, visualizes capacity, and alerts before burnout.
→ Assess your technicians’ workload with the help of NinjaOne
Strategic workload assessment for sustainable growth
Committing to new projects without a proper workload assessment jeopardizes existing SLAs, technician well-being, and project success.
Implementing a structured framework, such as defining benchmarks, reviewing active workloads, and forecasting capacity, transforms this risk into a strategic advantage.
By integrating tools like NinjaOne to automate reporting and align new work with verified capacity, MSPs can confidently pursue growth while ensuring service quality and team sustainability.
Quick-Start Guide
Here’s how NinjaOne can help when considering new IT projects:
1.Monitor Ticket Load and Response Times
Use NinjaOne’s dashboard to track the number of open tickets per technician and their average response times. This gives you a clear picture of who might be overloaded.
2. Leverage the Eisenhower Matrix
Prioritize tasks based on urgency and importance. Focus on critical issues first and delegate or schedule less urgent tasks. This helps distribute the workload more effectively.
3. Implement SMART Goals
Set Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound goals for your team.
For example:
“Ensure all high-priority tickets are responded to within 24 hours by keeping the open queue under 10 tickets.”
4. Use Zendesk Views and Slack Reminders
Customize Zendesk views to sort tickets by priority or customer tier. Set up Slack reminders for follow-ups and important tasks to keep everyone on track.
5. Schedule Regular Check-ins
Hold bi-weekly one-on-one meetings with your technicians to discuss their workload, address any concerns, and provide necessary training or support.
6. Utilize Offline Time Wisely
Ensure technicians use their offline time effectively by focusing on one ticket at a time and practicing proper ticket handling processes.
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