The Process Lie: Why Assigning Every Ticket is Crushing Your Team (and How to Fix It)

Here's the deal: You’ve got smart people, top-tier PSA tools, and a business running on sheer grit. And yet, you find your service desk is constantly battling backlogs, missed SLAs, and stressed-out technicians. You're essentially stuck in maintenance mode, not production mode.

The failure isn't in your technology or your people; it’s in your process. Specifically, it’s in a foundational lie most MSPs operate under: the belief that every ticket must be immediately assigned and scheduled.

I call this outdated approach the Stack-and-Run service process, or, as I’ve seen it play out, “load ‘em up and push ‘em out.” I promise you, this rigid system is the single greatest bottleneck to scaling your service delivery.

The Problem of the "Push" System

In the traditional "Push" method, business owners and dispatchers feel compelled to take every incoming ticket and jam it onto a specific technician's plate. They stack appointments back-to-back, filling the calendar from morning until close.

The moment you do this, you create a fragile system where success is accidental. This is why I refer to this practice as "ConnectDominoes." When a single tricky patch, a longer-than-expected resolution, or an unexpected priority call hits, the dominoes fall. The entire day's schedule—and the tech's mindset—crumbles.

I also call this practice “A-Lotta-Tasks” because the process mandates a technician's name be attached to a ticket for fear a ticket will somehow be lost otherwise. What will happen is that Bruce will have a pile of 40 tickets while Heather has 4. And worse yet, no one but Bruce can work on those 40 because “they're his". F#@k all that!

This process lie creates two massive problems:

1. Low Team Velocity: Technicians are forced to defend their stacked calendar. If I have twenty tickets assigned and Bruce has ten, and I ask him to help, his immediate, often defensive response is, "I'm pretty busy." He’s not being lazy; he’s defending the rigid schedule you assigned him. This prevents true teamwork and makes you operate far below your team’s capacity.
2. Reactive Chaos: Your team is focused on clearing the stack you pushed on them, not on prioritizing the most critical issues. You are trapped in firefighting, not executing a strategy.

Engineering Service Velocity with the Pull Method

Sustainable success is engineered. The pathway to getting to the next level requires you to stop trying to force work through an inflexible system and instead build a mechanism where the work is actively pulled by a highly accountable team. This is the dynamic and agile Pull method.

This strategy applies the foundational principles of Agile—a system designed for efficiency and speed—directly to your front-end service delivery.

Here is the simple, systems-based adjustment to your blueprint:

A critical tool in the Pull method is the relentless use of WINS (What Is Next Step) on every ticket.

When you remove fixed assignment constraints, you leverage the collective talent of your organization. If a ticket is simply waiting for "Client to verify that the thing opens and runs," any skilled, available technician can perform that task. Why does it have to be your tech Barbara that does it? When you allow the team to pull the next task, you achieve maximum flow and efficiency.

I’ve proven this time and again in the last decade with the numerous companies I’ve worked with. An Agile team using a Pull method will cut through twice the backlog as a team using Stack-and-Run. It’s that simple.

A New Culture of Execution

The single biggest competitive advantage you gain is a cultural one. Your tech Bruce no longer has ten assigned tickets he has to defend. When you ask him to handle a quick, high-priority item, his response changes from a reluctant, "Yeah, but I have to do this, I promised this, I’m scheduled to do this," to a simple, confident, "Okay."

Your tech goes and executes the task, returns to the single, clear stack, and keeps cutting through tickets. You replace individual ticket defense with team accountability to the shared goal of an empty queue. This frees up your team to unlock significant capacity, allowing them to focus on execution, not just scheduling.

The path to predictable results starts with accountability to a repeatable process. Eliminate the fear of tickets getting lost; trust the system, not the stack. Stop assigning, stop scheduling, and empower your team to pull the work. This is how you build a sustainable, scalable machine.

If you're looking for a clear blueprint to implement this kind of systematic change, my focused coaching and mastery programs are designed to provide that structured support and help you build a service machine tuned for growth.

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