How IT Managed Service Provider Black Tip Achieved Sub-3 Minute Response Times with Kanban

"We've hit sub-3-minute average response times across all clients and all issues ever since joining TopLeft. I can go back through all history and prove it." - Matthew Bookspan, Founder, Black Tip MSP

The Challenge: When MSPs Get Stuck 

Are you exhausted from juggling 20+ ticket statuses? 

Wrestling with projects that drag on for months? 

Watching tickets get escalated while waiting on third-party vendors? 

You're not alone. Most MSPs operate like they're stuck in quicksand—the harder they work, the deeper they sink. 

Why "Business as Usual" Keeps MSPs Stuck 

Black Tip MSP faced the same challenges in 2010. With a background in Scrum and software development, founder Matthew Bookspan saw an industry where: 

Complexity disguised itself as sophistication: 

• 20-30 ticket statuses creating decision paralysis 

• Dispatch bottlenecks choking response times 

• Projects lingering without clear milestones 

• Technicians cherry-picking tickets 

• Zero visibility across work in progress 

Fear took over progress: 

• "Kanban doesn't work for service tickets" 

• "We need dispatch to maintain order" 

• "Clients expect traditional service delivery" 

• "Our team won't adapt" 

The weight of these beliefs creates organizational inertia, a force so strong that 90% of MSPs never escape it. 

Think of it like a typical Monday morning: tickets flooding in from the weekend, technicians arguing over who takes the "nightmare" client, projects pushed to "next week" for the fifth time in a row. Everyone's busy, but nothing is actually moving forward. 

Starting Small and Building Momentum 

Year 1-3: Fighting Gravity with Sticky Notes 

Change didn't come easy. Black Tip's early years looked like: 

• Post-it notes on whiteboards 

• Mental mapping between boards and tickets 

• Manual workflows with limited software 

• Daily friction between old habits and new methods 

"Software was pretty limited back then. There were very few products that allowed you to do Kanban or anything of merit." - Matthew Bookspan 

But here's where physics works in your favor: Objects at rest stay at rest, but objects in motion stay in motion. 

The First Push: Simplification 

Instead of adding features, Black Tip stripped them away: 

From 20+ statuses to just 5: 

• Backlog - Work waiting to start 

• Blocked - Waiting on something 

• Ready - Prepared to begin 

• Doing - In progress 

• Done - Completed 

"If you're blocked, that means you're waiting for anything. Why do you have to have a special status? You're still waiting. What difference does it make?" - Matthew Bookspan 

Consider this: whether a ticket is "waiting on vendor," "waiting on parts," "waiting on approval," or "waiting on client response," your technician still can't work on it. Having 10 different ways to say "stuck" doesn't unstick anything. Instead, it just creates more fields to update in your PSA. 

Removing Friction: No Dispatch 

The boldest move? Eliminating dispatch entirely. 

"We've never had a dispatch person. I'm never gonna hire one. What we train here is for accountability. It comes in, you take it. It's a full pull model." - Matthew Bookspan 

This single decision removed the biggest bottleneck in their workflow, and their response times plummeted (in a good way). 

To put this in perspective: imagine eliminating the morning ritual of "Who's taking this ticket?" debates. No more cherry-picking the easy password resets while the complex server issues languish. When a ticket arrives, the next available tech grabs it. It's like switching from a traffic-clogged intersection to a highway on-ramp. This means that everything just flows, and nothing gets permanently stuck. 

The Solution: Building Frameworks That Compound 

Morning Huddles (15 minutes) 

• What's on your day? 

• What is blocking you? 

• Where can you help others? 

• Facts only, no war stories 

End-of-Day Ticket Review (15 minutes) 

Every ticket. Every day. No exceptions. 

"It takes 15 minutes to validate what we've already done throughout the day." - Matthew Bookspan 

These rituals create what physicists call angular momentum, meaning that once spinning, the system wants to keep spinning. 

Finding the Right Tools: Visual Workflow Management 

When Black Tip discovered ConnectWise's beta Kanban board and later TopLeft, everything accelerated: 

• Unified view of service tickets and projects 

• Automated ticket categorization 

• Color-coded visibility (brown = projects) 

• Real-time tracking across all work 

"When we could integrate not just reactive tickets but project tickets too, it completely changed our workflow. People who come to work for us go, 'Holy smokes, this is awesome because we totally understand what's happening right now.'" - Matthew Bookspan 

The Results: When Momentum Becomes Unstoppable 

Average Ticket Response Times 

• Year 1-3: Under 3 minutes average 

• Year 4-6: Periods under 2 minutes 

• Year 7-9: Stretches under 1 minute 

• Year 10-13: Consistently sub-3 minutes 

Project Delivery Metrics 

• Maximum 6 projects open simultaneously 

• Weekly sprints keep work flowing 

• Clients asking them to slow down 

"We've been told by some clients, 'Can you give us a couple of minutes before you respond?' They're like, 'We can only swallow so much.'" - Matthew Bookspan 

This is the MSP equivalent of a restaurant that's "too fast." One client told them, "I haven't even finished describing the problem in my email and you're already calling me back!" Another mentioned they started writing shorter tickets because they knew Black Tip would resolve issues before they could finish typing a novel-length description. 

The Mathematics of Momentum 

Following Kaizen principles: 

• 1 improvement per week = 52 annual changes 

• 1 improvement per business day = 240+ annual changes 

• 13 years of improvements = 3,000+ optimizations

Each change reduces friction. Less friction means more velocity. More velocity means easier change. It's a virtuous cycle that builds on itself. 

Here's what this looks like in practice: Year 1, they automated ticket categorization, which saves them 2 minutes per ticket. Year 2, they created email templates for common issues, meaning another minute is saved. Year 3, they integrated remote access tools (5 minutes saved). By year 13, those thousands of tiny improvements mean technicians spend time solving problems, not navigating systems. 

Getting Started: Your Implementation Roadmap 

Week 1-2: Create Initial Movement 

• Reduce statuses to under 10 

• Start visualizing workflow (even on paper) 

• Pick your first "pull" champion 

Week 3-4: Build Habits 

• Institute 15-minute daily huddles 

• Review yesterday's completed work 

• Track one metric that matters 

Month 2: Remove Friction 

• Eliminate dispatch bottlenecks 

• Automate ticket routing 

• Trust your technicians to self-assign 

Month 3: Accelerate 

• Integrate all work visually 

• Standardize your Kanban columns 

• Celebrate velocity improvements 

Why MSPs Struggle to Change 

"This method has been around for over 50 years in other industries. Yet in MSPs, we act like it's revolutionary. The resistance isn't logical—it's emotional." - Matthew Bookspan 

What keeps MSPs stuck: 

• Sunk cost in complex systems 

• Identity tied to traditional methods 

• Fear of client reaction 

• Comfort in familiar chaos 

What gets them moving: 

• Seeing immediate wins 
• Feeling the reduction in stress 
• Watching bottlenecks disappear 
• Experiencing client delight 

Making the Decision to Change 

Black Tip's journey reveals a fundamental truth: Making that first change to your workflow is harder than maintaining new processes once they're in place. 

The first push is reducing statuses, eliminating dispatch, starting daily huddles that feels impossible. However, once you start, momentum takes over. 

The question isn't whether Kanban and pull-based systems work for MSPs. Black Tip proved they do. The question is: Will you stay stuck in the quicksand of 30 ticket statuses, or will you take that first difficult step toward velocity? 

Start tomorrow. Pick one thing: 

• Reduce your ticket statuses by half 

• Run a 15-minute morning huddle 

• Create a simple Kanban board 

• Remove one bottleneck 

Because here's the truth: The hardest part of improving your service delivery isn't learning new processes. It's letting go of legacy workflows. 

And once you're moving? There's no going back.