Introducing Planner: Request-tracking and planning for modern MSPs

At Thread, we streamline requests and communications through chat for technicians and clients. That’s how we became aware of two common challenges: 

1. Even when tickets have owners, MSPs risk missing SLAs. Managed service providers often miss deadlines when requests don’t have a clear place within a technician’s workweek – even when there's a clear owner responsible for that work. This creates anxiety for techs and managers since meeting SLAs is foundational to delighting customers and powering great service.
2. Calendars don’t scale to meet modern MSP backlogging and prioritization practices. MSPs need to block off synchronous meetings with clients, but technician calendars are ill-suited for this — so techs miss customer meetings. It’s also demoralizing to confront a full calendar that doesn’t reflect a realistic day’s work. The chaos makes it difficult for technicians to coordinate work and focus on what’s most important: their client experience.

Planner is the resource allocation solution for MSPs 

We see how frustrating this situation is — so we set out to solve it.

Meet Planner: The request-tracking and scheduling solution that gives MSPs effortless control over their workweek.

With Planner, you decide the date and time a thread should be tackled — right down to the minute. Our tool embraces modern service practices and syncs with customer appointments so your techs never miss another meeting. 

Planner aligns with Agile practices

The swimlane workflow was designed with decades of Agile best practices in mind. Techs can drag and drop threads into a member’s swimlane for one-click assignments and then plan when they’ll accomplish the work that week.

Organizing assignments by technician makes it easy to see how much work your team has throughout a workday. If no tech has the capacity to address a request, it may be time to staff up! 

How Planner works

Planner’s layout reflects the ticket scheduling process.

• On the left: The triage swimlane.
• To the right: Swimlanes for each tech.

To adjust a tech’s schedule, drag threads from the triage section and drop them in that tech’s swimlane.

No available time slots? No problem! Threads assigned to a technician but not Planned will go to the tech’s “backlog” section. This way, when a tech has completed their Planned work, they won’t have to go hunting for the next request–they’ll find the next-highest priority item in their Backlog and get to work.

You can also add meetings and notifications to each tech’s planner, ensuring every aspect of their schedule is accounted for and that tech workloads remain realistic.

And rest assured — everything auto-syncs with the professional service automation, updating bi-directionally in real-time. 

Planner creates accountability for every request

With Planner, you won’t have to worry about customer requests falling through the cracks. Planner is inspired by the existing service coordination pattern of “scheduling” to create more accountability. This ensures techs have time to resolve every ticket across all service modalities, not just chat.

The best part? It works for MSPs of all sizes!

Planner improves team management and the technician experience 

Say goodbye to ad hoc resource management.

Planner helps highlight a team’s actual capacity. Managers schedule and assign all threads in conjunction with appointment automation solutions like TimeZest to coordinate customer appointments, all while keeping an eye on capacity vs. the true workload across technicians.

Planner also improves the tech experience by empowering service coordinators and managers with easy, top-level visibility into team capacity and customer demand. With a predefined schedule based on “job-to-be-done” length time slots, technician workflows stay calm and organized, letting them thrive in their roles. When a manager sees too many backlogged tickets, it’s a simple indicator that it’s time to hire or explore ways of creating more capacity–such as via automation or AI-enabled solutions.

Never lose a request again with Thread Planner

By creating unparalleled visibility and control over technician workloads, Planner magically de-stresses requests for MSPs and their clients. Book a demo today and learn how you can tap into an unfair advantage for your MSP.