So you want to address neglected work in your MSP? One of the first things you need to do is decide on the threshold for when a ticket is considered neglected- a number of days without activity. But it’s not as simple as deciding on a single number. You also need to consider the ticket’s status, because each status is different and it’s normal for tickets to wait longer between touches in some statuses than other statuses.
Here are TopLeft’s recommendations for neglected work thresholds for service tickets. If your MSP is just starting to address neglected work, you may need to initially use longer values to focus on the most neglected tickets, and then reduce the thresholds over a period of a few weeks or a month as you deal with the oldest tickets. This will help your team not be overwhelmed at the beginning.
TopLeft recommendations:
- New: 2 hours
- Ready: 2 days
- In Progress: 2 days
- Waiting on Customer: 7 days
- Waiting on Vendor: 7 days
- Scheduled: 14 days
- Completed & Closed: not applicable
These thresholds reflect that it’s OK for a ticket in Waiting on Customer to be idle for up to 7 days, but tickets in In Progress should see activity every 2 days, and tickets should be triaged out of New in no more than 2 hours.
Is Neglected Work Killing Your MSP?
You don’t have to sit around watching tickets become stale. Take back control using the techniques in the No More Neglect whitepaper. We teach how to define neglect thresholds, use built-in ConnectWise or Autotask tools to identify the tickets that violate those thresholds, how to track useful metrics, and how to incorporate the reporting into your workflows so you can eliminate neglected work once and for all.
