The MSP delivery glossary
Plain-English definitions of the project-management, PSA, and client-delivery terms MSPs actually use — written by people who run this work every day.
Co-managed IT is a delivery model where an MSP works alongside a client's in-house IT staff — sharing tools, tickets, and responsibilities — rather than fully replacing them.
Critical path scheduling finds the longest chain of dependent tasks in a project — the sequence that sets the earliest possible finish date. Any slip on the critical path pushes the whole project's end date.
A horizontal timeline of a project's tasks that shows when each one starts, how long it runs, and how the pieces overlap.
A visual board of columns and cards that shows every piece of work and exactly what stage it's in right now.
A zero-duration marker for a meaningful moment in a project — a checkpoint that signals a phase is complete, not a task that takes time.
MSP project management is the practice of planning and delivering IT projects — onboardings, migrations, rollouts — inside a managed-services business, where the plan has to connect to PSA billing and real technician capacity.
Post-merger integration (PMI) is the work of combining two organizations' IT after a merger or acquisition — identities, Microsoft 365 tenants, security baselines, tooling, and teams — into one environment.
Whether a project earned more than it cost to deliver — the gap between what you billed and the fully-loaded labor and expense behind it.
A PSA runs the whole MSP business — tickets, time, contracts, billing — with projects as one module. A dedicated project-management tool focuses on planning, dependencies, and scheduling. Most MSPs need both, working together.
A QBR (Quarterly Business Review) is a periodic client check-in, often ticket- and metric-heavy. An SBR (Strategic Business Review) reframes that meeting around the client's strategy, risks, and roadmap — outcomes, not just numbers.
A scheduling technique that resolves over-allocation by spreading work across the calendar so no technician is booked beyond their real capacity.
The document that pins down exactly what a project will deliver, by when, for how much, and how everyone will know it's done.
The rules that dictate what order tasks run in — the wiring that turns a list of work into a schedule that reschedules itself.
The share of a technician's available hours spent on productive, client-facing work — the core efficiency metric behind an MSP's labor cost.
Whitespace is the gap between what a customer already buys from you and everything you sell. Map every customer against every offering and the empty cells are your whitespace — the services that customer does not have yet.