What it Looks Like to Mooove to Moovila

CNWR’s Matt Clark recently moved his MSP’s project team to Moovila. Here’s how that went. 

With some software tools, you pay a fee, plug it into your tech stack and figure it out on your own. That’s not how Moovila works. Our onboarding process helps you align your project management goals to your processes and teaches you to use Perfect Project to improve everything from communication to profitability. 

Want a sense of what that’s like? We asked one of our customers – Matt Clark, VP of Operations at CNWR – to give you a behind-the-scenes look at how our onboarding team helped his MSP project team get a handle on projects. 

Clark came to Moovila hoping to find a process that would help his team deliver projects more consistently. CNWR had already dabbled with different tools and attempted to develop their own system. “We had pockets of success,” says Clark. But those pockets were marred by poor communication and slipping timelines. He discovered Moovila while on the hunt for a solution and presented it internally. “Everyone said, ‘Yes, this is it!” 

A lump of tickets 

That was the beginning of a journey for Clark and his MSP. The next step in that expedition was a big one.  

“When we started, we didn't have a dedicated projects team,” he says. “We would have ebbs and flows of churning through projects. Then we would jump back into business as usual and projects would slip again.” 

None of their previous attempts at addressing this project problem tackled the real issue. 

“We just had a lump of tickets,” he says. There were no dependencies, durations, templates, or timelines. No one was dedicated to the task, either. One person might spend 10 hours a week on projects, another might spend thirty.  

“It was a disaster,” says Clark. He went to a peer group meeting, seeking advice. “I was going over the problems we were having with projects. At this point, I intended to onboard every one of our engineers into Moovila Perfect Project. But my peers said, ‘Don't do that. You have to split off a projects team.” 

That was a wakeup call. From there, it was easy to do the math and see that this was an excellent idea. “We realized we had roughly 100 to 150 hours a week of project work,” he says. “We split out three bodies to focus on it. Now we have three engineers who are 100% project work.” 

The results were immediate. The chaos lifted and the team started to burn through projects. With no distractions from tickets or other work, the dedicated projects team was able to learn, adopt, and adhere to the PM best practices and strategies they were learning in their Moovila onboarding.  

Time to define “project” 

The next step in the journey was to nail down a project definition. This is an essential PM best practice. “We say anything above three hours, or five touches probably justifies considering if the work can be a project instead of a ticket,” says Clark. 

You don’t want to manage quick and easy tasks as projects. That adds to your overhead. But managing a project as a ticket is equally frustrating, since the steps and details of more complex jobs get buried in tickets. 

Turning a job into a project also buys you time.  

“You have an artificial timeout,” says Clark. “You can tell the customer that the timeline for that work is four to six weeks out.” And that gives you time to plan the work, assign it, and see how it fits into your backlog.  

That planning work gives you a view of the future. Building projects out and assigning them to people shows you how busy your people are and how busy they will be in the future, based on your backlog of work. 

“I can look at how much work is in the pipeline,” says Clark, “and see that I have enough work coming that if I were to add an additional project resource, there will be enough work for them – and I would still have a backlog.” 

Embrace templates 

Getting projects into templates, according to Clark, was one of the best pieces of the Moovila onboarding experience.  

“When we were testing Moovila Perfect Project, I went to a demo at a peer group,” he says. “People in that group told me I had to have everything templated.” This was already a goal for his team but not one they were having much success with. “Before we were using this tool, we used templates about 50% of the time,” he says. 

During the onboarding, his project team, with the help of Moovila’s onboarding team, took the time to build out templates for jobs as they planned them.  

“That was the tipping point,” he says. “I'd say 100% of our projects are now run from templates. If we don't have a template, we build it. That's just part of our process now, and it has been a big step in getting us to project maturity.” 

Do we need a project manager? 

Until now, Clark’s team has found that Moovila Perfect Project, with its automated timelines, 24/7 monitoring, and RPAX project scoring, makes it possible to manage projects using the tool as a shared resource with no dedicated project manager. Clark and a dispatcher often step in to massage data and do work assignments and it has been going well. 

But the company is growing. And as their project load grows, and their data collection on projects improves, that is changing.  

“We track how many hours we're spending on projects,” he says. “Most companies scope projects assuming that 10 to 20% of the overall hours are project management.” A general rule is that if you're doing 200 to 300 hours of project work, you can justify a project manager. “We are just into that realm now,” he says. “Also, the team is starting to fall behind on updating templates and reaching out to customers. That tells me it's time to bring someone in to do template triage and client engagement. So, we are looking to hire a project manager.” 

Since his team now has efficient processes and systems to manage projects, though, whoever they hire will have a much easier job. Instead of handing that new PM a lump of tickets and the task of coming up with a system to manage them, that new hire will step into a robust, functioning process.  

“They can hit the ground running,” he says. 

Clear client communication 

One area where the tools in Moovila made a massive change for Clark was in communicating project plan to clients.  

It is part of the CNWR onboarding process to send a written timeline at the start of a project.

“Those were based on hopes and dreams,” says Clark. “We would say we have a backlog of four to six weeks. But where was that coming from? Just touch and feel.” 

Those timelines were time consuming, too. Clark spent hours bouncing back and forth with his team to find out who was available to work on what and how a project fit into previous commitments and priorities. “And it was always wrong,” he says.  

After onboarding with Moovila Perfect Project, he started using the Smart Schedule functionality, which shows resources’ schedules, workloads, and availability. Knowing the steps of a project tells him how much time he needs from what resources. Smart Schedule shows him when they will be available. Because of all this real-time, accurate data, the first time he did a timeline for a client in Moovila Perfect Project, it was a revelation.  

“It literally told me the end date,” he says. “It told me what we are doing every single day based on the template and the dependencies. I wanted to screenshot it and send it to the client. I didn’t do that, but it was great. It saved me hours.”  

Moovila pays for itself 

“There's a lot of work that goes into projects that people don’t capture in their project plans,” says Clark. This might include project management, massaging finances, scheduling resources, and working through crisis management when things go off the rails. “This makes it seem like your projects are more profitable than they are. Once you build out a team and project plans and commit to projects, you start capturing that work. Then you make sure you’re getting paid for it. Moovila Perfect Project helped us see that. It also cut a lot of time out of our processes. Before we started using it, I might have said we were doing an okay job on projects. But now that I know the truth? Moovila Perfect Project pays for itself.” 

Ready to talk to a specialist about solving your MSP’s project problems? Book a demo today.