Key Points
Coordinating Project and Support Teams Using Unified Workload Management
- Shared Visual Timelines: Use shared timeline visuals like Kanban boards and Gantt charts to align project and support schedules, identify conflicts early, and maintain workflow transparency.
- Capacity Planning and Forecasting: Use historical ticket and workload data to anticipate demand spikes, balance technician capacity, and prevent burnout.
- Agile Project Coordination: Implement sprint-based planning and cross-team visibility to adapt quickly to changes while keeping project goals and SLAs aligned.
- Real-Time Monitoring and Dashboards: Leverage live performance metrics and alerts to identify workload overlaps early and ensure proactive issue resolution.
- Governance and Continuous Improvement: Conduct regular post-project reviews to optimize timelines, refine processes, and strengthen accountability across teams.
This guide provides best practices and tips for managed service providers (MSPs) to coordinate their unified workload management and timelines. It can act as a template for MSP project planning, helping you build a scalable unified workflow for daily support operations that avoids schedule conflicts, unanticipated delays, and technician burnout.
What is a unified workflow?
A unified workflow is a project planning method that combines, visualizes, prioritizes, and adapts your distinct workflows so that full visibility is achieved over all of them at once. For growing MSPs, this means that you can avoid scheduling conflicts between new client onboarding, project rollouts, patching, and handling incoming support tickets. It also helps avoid overworking your technicians, ensuring a manageable workload is maintained across multiple projects.
This leads to more effective teams and better results for clients as work is de-duplicated, and the elimination of conflicts prevents project timelines from slipping. This enhances client trust and confidence, as your quoted delivery dates are always met and issues are resolved promptly.
Unified workload management core components and methods
The core components described below will help you build your unified workload management strategy. Your specific implementation should be tailored to the strengths of your MSP team and your clients’ requirements.
| Management workflow component | Purpose/value |
| Shared timeline visuals | Unifies project and support team scheduling |
| Capacity-informed planning and hold windows | Prevents overbooking during high-support periods and preserves bandwidth for recurring support demands |
| Sprint-based joint planning | Encourages incremental, adaptable team coordination |
| Live dashboards and alerts | Brings visibility to overload before it can lead to failure |
| Governance review loops | Reinforces continuous improvement and accountability |
Implement shared timeline visuals for project management
Visualizing timelines helps to clearly communicate expectations to stakeholders and makes it easier to spot potential bottlenecks and conflicts in real-time.
Kanban boards provide a lean management method that allows your team to collaborate and track the progress of project milestones, while adding visual context. Gantt charts can also be used to display a project’s timelines and deadlines based on its schedule. No special tools are required for these (both can be constructed in an Excel spreadsheet or shared document), but tools like Trello, Asana, WeKan provide Kanban apps with extra collaborative features, while Microsoft Project can be used to create Gantt charts.
You can use these tools to track project milestones as well as expected spikes in support demand where extra capacity may be required, for example, during patch windows.
Many MSP platforms include tools for consolidating and visualizing operational data, and can also be integrated into planning and management workflows.
Integrate capacity planning into project scoping
You can proactively identify and mitigate bottlenecks by collecting historical ticket data and analyzing it for patterns, and using the insights provided to avoid launching new projects during predicted high-support periods (for example, during scheduled software patch release windows, new client onboarding, or times when staff availability is reduced).
Your MSP platform should include robust reporting features that combine usage and ticket desk monitoring to identify this. Patch management can also be leveraged to spread out the installation of non-critical patches, and ensure that they are properly tested to avoid interruption.
Use agile sprint rhythm to coordinate commitments
Recognize the benefits of agile project management and reinforce mutual ownership by running joint fortnightly planning across your project and support teams. Break down problems and ensure that there is shared visibility of both ticket SLAs and project goals, and define clear work commitments for each team.
Build alerting dashboards for overlap risks
In addition to static visualizations as part of project planning, you can inform your unified workload management with live dashboards displaying infrastructure status and live ticket metrics. Your MSP platform should also be configurable to send notifications to technicians and stakeholders if normal thresholds are breached, or if there is an unexpected incident that may affect other ongoing work. This allows you to pre-emptively identify overlaps and avoid conflicts.
Add governance reviews to sustain alignment
Even if timelines are being met, it may still be possible to increase efficiency and increase availability for new client prospects. After each quarter or delivered project, you should visualize the actual timeline of your project and compare it to your planned timeline to ensure that realistic targets were set, and identify where unexpected overlaps caused missed targets.
You should also consult with project stakeholders. From there, you can adjust your planning cadence, hold windows, and triage protocols to improve the outcomes of future projects, and ensure that ongoing support responsibilities do not impact them.
NinjaOne enables data-driven MSP project management, helping you build a realistic unified workload timeline
MSPs that use NinjaOne can leverage its built-in reporting and management tools to coordinate and continually enhance their unified workflows, building ambitious but achievable timelines and avoiding support bottlenecks.
Using NinjaOne’s MSP tools, you can:
- Add ticket volume heatmaps and project phase milestones to a shared Gantt chart stored in NinjaOne’s shared documentation
- Schedule joint sprint planning between project and support leads, and keep parties updated using built-in helpdesk communication tools
- Set automation rules to alert when support load exceeds thresholds via SMS, email, or push notification
- Adjust milestone timing or divert resources based on monitoring data collected from across your entire infrastructure
- Use retrospectives to fine-tune the process, update hold windows, and reinforce shared accountability
NinjaOne powers successful MSPs by giving full visibility into the status of clients’ infrastructure, allowing you to integrate this data with your project planning and unify project and support timelines. This avoids gaps and conflicts, ensuring your tech team is always productive without being overworked or scrambling to meet delivery windows.
Quick-Start Guide
NinjaOne offers several tools and strategies to help coordinate project and support teams:
Key Strategies
1. Eisenhower Matrix Prioritization
– Categorize tasks based on urgency and importance
– Helps teams focus on high-priority activities
– Allows delegation of less critical tasks
2. Time Management Tools
– Zendesk Ticket Views
– Customize ticket views to prioritize tasks
– Sort and group tickets by various criteria
– Add columns for easy prioritization
– Slack Reminders
– Set up reminders for tasks
– Create personal to-do lists
– Track time-sensitive activities
– Outlook Calendar Blocks
– Allocate dedicated time for specific tasks
– Ensure uninterrupted focus on important activities
3. Collaboration Features
– Side Conversations in Zendesk
– Traceable communication threads
– Multi-team collaboration
– Centralized information tracking
4. Team Coordination Practices
– Regular One-on-One Meetings
– Discuss workload and priorities
– Track individual and team performance
– Provide coaching and support
Recommended Workflow
1. Use Eisenhower Matrix to prioritize tasks
2. Utilize Zendesk ticket views for task management
3. Set up Slack reminders and calendar blocks
4. Conduct regular team coordination meetings
5. Use side conversations for cross-team collaboration
By implementing these strategies, NinjaOne supports effective workload coordination between project and support teams, ensuring efficient task management and communication
