You need your PSA to manage tickets. An intelligent project management tool, though, will help you master the challenge of profiting from projects.
For many MSPs, projects are make-it-or-break-it territory. As your MSP matures, so does the complexity of the projects you take on. And complex projects can quickly become a pain point. Without robust project management tools and practices, projects slip past deadlines, exceed their scope, erode profits, and create problems that spill over into other work.
This is expensive. But it doesn’t have to be.
With the right systems, projects can be predictable, profitable, and scalable. This requires, though, that you move away from manual project tracking and tap into the power of automation. In the same way that you can’t effectively handle tickets without your PSA, you need a robust project management solution to manage projects.
“You might have all the best practices in place,” explains Adam Bielanski, CEO of MSP+ in the webinar Project Management Best Practices for 2025. “But without the right tools, executing them at scale becomes nearly impossible.”
The solution? Integrate an autonomous project management tool into your PSA.
A ticketing system is not a project manager
You rely on your PSA. And it is great at managing tickets. But when the work is bigger and more complex than a ticket, what do you do? Using a ticketing system to manage projects creates problems. When the details of a project are buried in a ticket, you have no insight into the job’s progress.
Even with your PSA’s project management tool, you are limited to viewing the project plan in a basic Gantt chart or on static timelines. This might help you explain to the client what to expect but it makes it difficult for your team to manage the project.
With no autonomous, built-in intelligence to alert you when a task deadline or project delivery date is at risk, you will miss deadlines. A rigid PM tool that lacks automation and deep intelligence is challenging – if not impossible – to maintain. And that means your project management best practices will also be difficult to sustain.
Keeping that timeline accurate is a huge task. Someone has to manually check the details, update the work progress, dig into the project to see if it is slipping, and detect when things have gone off the rails. Even if you hire an army of project managers to do this – at which point you will no longer be making money – this is a nearly impossible task. But failing at this leads to bottlenecks, missed deadlines, and engineers who are sometimes overloaded with work and other times sitting idle.
This kind of project chaos infects your entire organization. When your team is reacting to project problems, it is dropping the ball elsewhere. If your team ignores projects because they are invisible, you will lose profits, and your customers will be unhappy.
Many MSPs struggle to know when to move work from tickets to projects. If that sounds familiar, check out our webinar, Projickets: How to Identify When a Ticket Should Be a Project, where we cover the risks of keeping projects in your PSA and best practices for efficiency and profitability.
A smart project management tool
Moovila Perfect Project for MSPs was designed from the ground up to tackle the complex task of managing projects at an MSP. Like a traditional project management tool, it facilitates breaking a complex project into steps and phases and presents you with a map of the project, from start to finish, with all the tasks, durations, and milestones clearly called out. Like the tools in your PSA, it is easy to share this plan with the client to make it clear what’s included – and what isn’t – in the project, which can help prevent scope creep.
But it goes well beyond this. It connects your team and client to the project, continuously monitors the project progress, constantly calculates the risk of missing deadlines, and actively alerts your team when a project needs attention. It integrates with your ticketing system and the schedules of everyone on your team, so you have clarity on all the work across your organization.
Planning work
When you assign work to a team member with Perfect Project, you can see everything about their schedule from one dashboard. The tickets your team members are working on, the meetings on their calendars, other projects on their plates, and their time off are all integrated into one view so that it is clear who has the time to take on the project you are scheduling. When you assign them work, they accept it with a digital handshake and the tool puts the work on their calendar. Team members track their time within the tool and mark tasks complete when the work is finished.
As you build the project, artificial intelligence assists you. It offers a score that reflects how well your plan sticks to project management best practices while it debugs your plan for mistakes. It makes helpful suggestions so you can quickly build a solid plan. Once you have a great plan, you can save it as a template to use every time you do the same type of work.
“Project managers and coordinators are spending hours every week doing things manually that technology, in this day and age, should be doing for them.”
– Vince Jajuga, VP of Sales and Partnerships at Moovila
A glance alerts you to problems
As the plan unfolds, built-in autonomous project monitoring and management (APMM) monitors the project progress constantly, noting immediately if a task is late and calculating the effect of the delay on every other task in the project. It looks downstream, analyzing the likelihood of problems that haven’t happened yet so that you can prevent chaos. It knows everyone’s work commitments and schedules, using this information in its calculations. Using all this data, it presents a constant, live score of the project’s health.
Instead of gathering and entering project progress manually, your project manager has only to glance at the scores, on a project portfolio dashboard, to see if there is a problem in any of the projects your MSP is handling. Instead of spending hours entering data about projects, your PM can spend that time solving problems and getting projects back on track.
AI-assisted mitigation
Moovila Perfect Project will also help mitigate problems in your plans. When the AI sees a problem, it calculates solutions, allocating work to other team members with the right skills, perhaps, or shortening the duration of a future task. To repair the plan after a delay, you can simply choose the solution that best suits the situation. Click on the remediation you want. The AI will make all the changes necessary to every other task in the plan and alert the team to the changes.
“Project managers and coordinators are spending hours every week doing things manually that technology, in this day and age, should be doing for them,” says Vince Jajuga, VP of Sales and Partnerships at Moovila, in the Project Management Best Practices for 2025 webinar. “What if you gave them back that time? Think about how many more projects they could take on, and the capacity that they would have to help you scale the organization.”
The work clarity this intelligent project management system gives you prevents scope creep, so your projects become profitable. It allows your current team to effectively manage a portfolio of complex projects. And it helps you deliver projects on time, so your customers are happy.
Check out the Project Management Best Practices for 2025 webinar where Vince Jajuga, VP of Sales and Partnerships at Moovila, Adam Bielanski, Chief Community & Ecosystems Officer at MSP+, and Moovila’s VP of Growth Marketing, Kate Schlarf break down and demonstrate autonomous project management and how to integrate it into your PSA.
