process
fundamentals
ticket
Also known as: work item, case, incident ticket
A unit of trackable work in the PSA, every customer interaction, alert response, or request becomes one.
A ticket is the smallest indivisible unit of MSP work. If something happens, user calls, alert fires, scheduled task runs, there is, eventually, a ticket about it. Tickets are how you bill, measure SLA, and prove what you did.
Discipline around tickets separates a calm MSP from a chaotic one:
- Open one for everything, including the 30-second tasks
- Time entries match real elapsed minutes, not “1 hour” rounded
- Status reflects truth: In Progress, Waiting on Customer, Waiting on Vendor are all different
- Resolution notes describe what was actually changed, not “fixed”
- One ticket per issue, bundling unrelated problems is how things get lost