You sold the project three weeks ago. The client's excited. Your team estimated it at 40 hours. Should be done by now, right?

Instead, it's sitting at 15% complete. Your lead tech keeps getting pulled into P1 tickets. Your PM or AM is sending apology emails. And the client is starting to wonder if they made the right call.

Sound familiar?

Here's the truth: most MSPs don't have a delivery problem. They have a capacity collision. And they're losing it every single day because they're running two different work systems in the same room.

The Chaos You Didn't Know You Were Fighting

Every MSP runs two fundamentally different types of work:

Tickets are reactive. They show up unannounced, demand immediate attention, and follow (hopefully) established processes. They're reactive interrupts. The "my email isn't working" calls, password resets, the server down alerts.

Projects are proactive. They have start dates, end dates, dependencies, and milestones. They're the strategic work: the migrations, the implementations, the infrastructure upgrades and improvements that enable your clients outcomes and business success.

Here's where it breaks: you're scheduling both from the same resource pool, with the same dispatching logic, in the same "room."

And tickets always win.

Why Tickets Always Win (And Projects Always Lose)

Tickets have urgency. Projects have importance. Guess which one gets attention when your dispatcher is staring at a board full of red SLAs?

The math is brutal:

• A P1 ticket screams for attention. It has an SLA clock ticking. The client is calling. AI or human your dispatcher sees red.
• A project task sits quietly on a schedule. No one's calling about it. The deadline is "next week." It can wait.

So your best tech: the one you blocked out for that new infrastructure to supprt a line of business application: gets pulled to fix a cloud server being down or a printer jam at your most vocal client. The project slips a day, maybe two. Then a week.

The project didn't fail because of bad estimation. It failed because you have a capacity collision.

The "Whoever's Available" Planning Debt

Most MSPs dispatch projects the same way they dispatch tickets: whoever's available gets the work.

This creates three predictable failures:

1. Context Switching Destroys Productivity

Your tech starts the morning on a server migration. Gets pulled for a ticket at 10 AM. Returns to the project at 2 PM and spends 30 minutes remembering where they left off. Gets pulled again at 3:30. By end of day, they've "worked" 8 hours but completed maybe 3 hours of actual project progress.

Research consistently shows that context switching can cost 20-40% of productive time. You're paying for 40 hours of project work and getting 25.

2. Project Delays Compound

Unlike tickets, projects have dependencies. When Phase 1 slips, Phase 2 can't start. When the network config is delayed, the application deployment waits. One two-day slip becomes a two-week delay.

And unlike tickets, you already quoted a price. Every day of delay eats into your margin.

3. Your Best People Burn Out

Who gets pulled for P1 tickets? Your senior techs. Who's assigned to complex projects? Your senior techs. They're being asked to context-switch constantly while carrying the weight of both reactive and proactive work.

They're not burning out because they're weak. They're burning out because you built a system that makes sustainable work impossible.

The Real Cost: It's Not Just Delayed Projects

When projects and tickets collide, you don't just lose project margin. You lose everything:

Client trust erodes. That migration you promised in two weeks? It took four or more. The client doesn't care about your ticket volume. They see broken promises.

Profitability tanks. Projects priced at fixed fees become money losers. You quoted 40 hours, delivered 60, and absorbed the overrun because you can't go back to the client and explain your scheduling chaos.

Growth stalls. You can't sell more projects if you can't deliver the ones you have. Your sales team stops selling because delivery can't keep up. Or worse: they keep selling, and the pile grows.

Your team leaves. Good techs don't want to work in chaos. They want to finish things. They want to do good work. When every day is a fire drill interrupted by half-finished projects, they start looking elsewhere.

The Fix: Stop Managing a Capacity Collision in Two Different Rooms

Here's what stabilization actually looks like for project vs. ticket collision:

1. Separate the Resource Pools

Not completely: you probably can't afford dedicated project teams. But you need protected time.

Block specific techs for project work on specific days. Tuesday and Thursday, Sarah is on projects. Period. She doesn't exist for ticket dispatch those days. Her name doesn't show up on the available board.

This isn't a luxury. It's math. If you need 40 hours of project work completed, you need 40 hours of protected time. Not 40 hours of "available unless something comes up."

2. Create Escalation Criteria That Actually Mean Something

When can a project tech get pulled for tickets? Define it clearly:

• Client-down situations affecting more than 10 users
• Security incidents
• SLA breaches at Tier 1 clients

"We're busy" is not a criterion. "This client is upset" is not a criterion. If everything is an exception, nothing is protected.

3. Schedule Projects Like Projects (Not Like Big Tickets)

If you’re not using the PM module in your PSA, you’re not “doing projects.”

You’re just creating long tickets.

Yeah, cliché time: "if you fail to plan, you plan to fail."

Tickets get dispatched. Projects get scheduled.

Use real project scheduling: dependencies, milestones, and resource allocation. If your PSA has PM features, use them. If it doesn’t, you’ve got a tool problem on top of a process problem.

A project task shouldn’t be floating waiting for someone to grab it.

It should be assigned to a specific person, on a specific day, with clear deliverables.

4. Track Project Time Separately

You can't fix what you don't measure. Start tracking:

• Scheduled project hours vs. actual project hours
• Project delays and root causes
• Tech utilization on project work vs. reactive work

When you see that your "40-hour project" actually consumed 65 hours of logged time over 6 weeks, you'll understand the true cost of the reactive overhead.

This should be part of your "Lessoned Learned" post projectreview, you are doing those right?

5. Set Client Expectations Differently

Projects and tickets have different communication rhythms.

Tickets get status updates and resolution notices. Projects get weekly progress reports, milestone notifications, and proactive delay communication.

If a project is slipping, the client should hear it from you: with a new timeline: before they have to ask.

This Is Stabilization Work

If you're reading this and recognizing your own operation, you're not broken. You're just unstable.

That's not an insult. It's a diagnosis and it's fixable. Stabilization means building the systems and boundaries that let your operation run predictably. It means stopping the daily chaos long enough to create sustainable delivery.

You can't grow if you can't deliver. You can't deliver if projects and tickets are constantly colliding. And you can't stop the collision without intentional structural changes.

This isn't about working harder. Your team is already working hard. It's about working differently.

The Bottom Line

Projects and tickets are fundamentally different work types. They require different scheduling approaches, different resource protection, and different client communication.

When you treat them the same: dispatching from one pool, letting tickets always win: you get predictable results: delayed projects, burnt-out techs, frustrated clients, and eroding margins.

The fix isn't complicated. It's intentional:

• Protect project time
• Define real escalation criteria
• Schedule projects like projects
• Track the collision so you can see it
• Communicate differently with clients

If projects and service are constantly colliding in your operation, this is stabilization work. It's the foundation that makes everything else: growth, profitability, team retention: actually possible.

Ready to reduce the capacity collision? Book time to talk about 6S Ops and let's fix the collision.