Stop Training Your Business to Lie to You

If you want to fix your service delivery, you have to stop treating your PSA tool like a glorified suggestion box. It is the operating system of your business.

I developed the Ten Golden Rules of PSA not as a list of "best practices" or "helpful tips” but as constraints. They are rules designed to force reality back into a system that naturally drifts toward chaos, emotional prioritization, and polite self-deception.

And it all starts with Rule #1.

If you can’t follow this one, the other nine won't matter.

Rule 1: All Work Is Performed Against a Ticket

Every service organization breaks this rule long before it admits it has.

It always starts innocently enough. A technician is already on the phone with a client. The client says the magic words: “Hey, while I’ve got you…”

Or maybe someone notices a small issue while fixing a bigger one. An internal server needs a reboot, and “it’ll only take a minute.” The idea of “No ticket” feels faster. It feels more helpful. It feels more human.

And yet every single time, the system pays for that decision later.

The System Has Amnesia

Here’s the deal: Work done without a ticket does not disappear. It simply becomes unaccounted for. The time is still spent. The interruption still occurs. The context switch still drains your technician's energy.

But the system never records it. From the system’s point of view, that work never happened.

This is where your service delivery system begins to lie to you.

You cannot manage what you cannot measure. Without a ticket, work becomes anecdotal. You remember being busy. You remember fixing things. You remember helping people. But you cannot prove where the day went, why capacity vanished, or which kinds of work are quietly consuming the business.

When all work is performed against a ticket, the system gains memory. When work happens outside it, the system develops amnesia.

The Ticket is the "Container for Truth"

Stop thinking of tickets as administrative overhead. That’s the mindset of a chaotic shop, not a mature MSP.

The ticket is the container for truth. It is the only place where intent, effort, time, and outcome are bound together in a way the system can learn from.

This rule exists to eliminate invisible work – not because invisible work is rare, but because it is the default failure mode of service organizations.

Internal work is the most common offender here. Internal IT, tool maintenance, cleanup, rework, technical debt – these are all real, necessary forms of labor. But because they are uncomfortable to face, organizations quietly allow them to happen “off the books.”

Over time, this invisible internal work cannibalizes the capacity that leadership thinks is available for clients. Service managers start planning based on fantasy. Technicians feel overwhelmed for reasons they cannot articulate.

Leadership responds by pushing harder instead of looking deeper. You start hearing things like:

• “No one is managing their time.”
• “People need to be more efficient.”
• “We must have a motivation problem.”

In reality, the system is blind.

Protection, Not Punishment

This rule also protects your technicians in ways that aren’t immediately obvious.

Seasoned technicians often resist tickets the hardest. They can carry the context in their heads. They can remember what they did. They can juggle five things at once. And in doing so, they unknowingly become a bottleneck and a single point of failure.

A ticket creates a defensible record. It shows what was done, why it was done, and what constraints existed at the time. In a mature organization, this record is not used to punish – it is used to understand. It shifts conversations from “Why didn’t you?” to “Why did the system make this hard?”

When work happens outside the system, none of that protection exists. Expectations drift. Memory becomes selective. Accountability becomes emotional.

No Ticket. No Work.

The moment you allow work to happen without a ticket, you are choosing comfort over clarity. You are choosing speed in the moment over control in the long run. You are training the system to lie to you – politely, consistently, and convincingly.

And once a system has learned to lie, it will continue to deceive you until you make the conscious choice to reset the standard.

This is why Rule #1 is not a guideline. No ticket. No work.

Not because you are rigid – but because you are serious about running a system that can actually improve.

Real growth requires a foundation of accurate data. You cannot engineer a better future for your company if you don't know where your present resources are actually going. Enforcing this rule is the signal to your team – and to yourself – that you are done operating in the dark. It is the baseline requirement for maturity.

Are you running your business on facts or feelings?

If you're ready to stop guessing and start engineering a service delivery machine that actually scales, it starts with the discipline to enforce Rule #1 of the Ten Golden Rules of PSA. Because if it's not in the PSA, it didn't happen.

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