If you ask project managers, technicians, and leaders at MSPs what they love – and hate – about projects, you will get a staggering array of answers. Some say they projects are the key to staying profitable in slow times. Others find them to be fun. For some MSP’s, they are they a drain on resources and a risk to profitability. It seems that your feelings about project depend on the goals of your MSP and how good your team is at managing the details, staying within the scope, and moving projects toward completion.
To unearth the reasons MSPs either love or hate projects, we pelted their teams with questions and hunted discussion boards. And we found seven things MSP techs, project managers, and decision makers love and hate about projects.
Hate: The chaos of too many projects
When a team takes on projects that then end up taking a back burner to more urgent work, project completion times can slip constantly into a distant future. Meanwhile, more projects get added to the pile. And it starts to feel like one of those dreams where you try to run but can’t move your legs. This is the chaos of too many projects.
“I'm currently managing 26 active projects and working on 35 pending scopes,” says one Reddit poster about project chaos. “I am always under pressure to get things completed and billed.” But with everyone focused on the work in front of them – managed services, emergencies, and the day-to-day – the mountain of projects won’t move.
Part of the problem here is project management hygiene. Keeping projects on track is much easier if you standardize the project template. “We have probably ten project types that are super standardized so it's a pretty turnkey scope,” said one commenter who has managed to master the project problem. “Repeatable templates [is] key.”
Love: Projects are great for building relationships
“Project work is a great way to keep billable hours up, build relationships, and continue to grow the business,” said one Reddit commenter in a discussion about taking on projects for non-customers. While many in the discussion refuse to accept projects unless they were for managed services clients, a few dissenters love them for building relationships and helping clients see why they want to become a managed service client.
“I can't tell you the number of project work customers I've had over the years that showed up, weren't initially interested in anything beyond what they wanted at that time, but today are deeply technology dependent and a huge revenue generator,” agreed another commenter. “Relationship building is business building.”
Hate: Project management tools that are inadequate to the task
Many MSP technicians and project managers struggle to manage projects because the tools – designed for software developers or simply inadequate – aren’t up to the complex task of managing a portfolio of projects in addition to managed services. “A large portion of our projects are small,” said Whitney Risner, Project Manager at OptimizedIT in response to Moovila’s recent State of the Industry 2024: MSP Project Management Trends & Impacts report. “But they require a lot of steps. They require a lot of nuance and we have a whole lot of them. So, you can't do this off of Excel or Smartsheet. You just can't. There is no way.”
Despite Risner’s conviction that dedicated tools are necessary to this effort, though, many MSPs are attempting to do just that. Nearly a third of the MSPs who responded to the externally managed survey saying they manage projects with spreadsheets (29%) or Smartsheet (5.8%).
Love: The profit from projects
“While there are some profits in the standard service package,” said one Reddit poster. “We found project and service work to be way more profitable.”
Many MSPs have discovered the same thing. When you learn to manage them – fitting the project’s tasks in with your ticket scheduling, managing resources well, keeping projects moving forward, and meeting delivery dates so you can bill for projects in a timely fashion – they can be cash cows.
One Reddit commentor, for example, loves audits. “Great profit, great chance(s) to analyze different environments and it opens opportunities for contracts,” he says.
“Extra bonus: you see very messy situations and showcase your professional value to the customer.”
Hate: Projects that are poorly scoped
A common lament in Moovila’s MSP Project Management Trends & Impacts report – a challenge experienced by nearly half of respondents – was an “Inability to stick the project scope.”
Scoping a project is complex. When done well, a scope relies on a significant amount of real-world data. But many people do something more akin to a guestimate.
“People always have ‘paint the room’ syndrome,” said one commenter on Reddit, in a discussion about scoping. “Ask someone how long they think it will take to paint a small room, and they will say, ‘half a day.’ They forget the preparation, moving furniture out, covering up, cutting in, multiple coats, and bringing the furniture back in. People are terrible at guessing how long projects will take and always forget to add time in for problems that are going to occur.”
Using robust tools to scope, assign, and track the progress of projects lets you gather this data so you can see how long, in reality, it takes your team to “paint a room.”
Love: Projects are great for padding billable hours
Even when you don’t see project work as a way to build your roster of managed service clients, project work is, according to some MSP decision-makers, a great way to pad profits when work is slow and to do work that is fun and different.
“If your business is flourishing, you have managed customers coming out your ears, and your staff doesn't have the capacity, then obviously you have the luxury of picking and choosing,” said one Reddit poster. “If not, project work is a great way to keep billable hours up, build relationships and continue to grow the business.”
Hate: Projects that eat profits
Many respondents to Moovila’s MSP Project Management Trends & Impacts report felt that the way they manage projects is a risk to their profitability. Projects that exceed their scope, drag on forever, and distract resources from managed work sap resources and eat at the bottom line. MSPs need a robust tool to manage their complex portfolios of work, one that integrates with their PSA, doesn’t require that the project manager spend hours updating it, and that delivers and tracks KPIs.
Heather Wagner, Director of Professional Services at the IronEdge Group, believes she has found that tool. “Moovila finally gives MSPs a way to manage a portfolio of projects and quickly make changes across any one project at any given time,” she says in the report. “Our clients have seen a significant difference in how quickly we're getting their projects done. We got ROI almost at the gate, at least from the PMO.”
When managed well, projects can be a strong source of revenue, customer goodwill, and new clients. The key is to use a tool that automates the process.
Learn how to take your projects from hate to love by exploring some of our project management educational resources in our blog and our on-demand webinar library.
