A Project Management Playbook for IT Services Companies
This is an illustrative walkthrough, not a named customer story. An IT services company with about forty engineers ran managed support and fixed-scope projects side by side, off the same bench, and could never quite say who was actually free.
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One bench, two kinds of work, no shared view of either
Picture an IT services company of around forty engineers, serving a dozen or so client accounts. Some accounts were on a managed support contract, generating an unpredictable stream of tickets. Others were on fixed-scope projects with a delivery date. Most engineers were split across both kinds of work at once, nominally sixty percent on a project build and forty percent on support for a different client, a split that existed on paper but was almost never true on any given day.
Support tickets arrived by email or through a client portal and got assigned by whichever delivery lead happened to notice them first, often to whichever engineer was easiest to reach rather than whoever actually had time. Project work ran on a separate planning process entirely, with its own timeline, largely disconnected from the support side of the business even when the exact same engineers were staffed on both.
Nobody had a single, reliable answer to "who's actually free this week." Utilization was estimated, informally, from whoever seemed stressed in stand-up.
Before: margin that disappeared between the contract and the invoice
The clearest business impact was on margin, and it was invisible until the quarter closed. An engineer nominally allocated forty percent to a support account might, in a busy week, spend most of their time there instead, quietly eating into the hours committed to the project account, with nobody noticing until that project's deadline was suddenly at risk.
Billable hours were reconstructed after the fact for invoicing, which meant they were approximate. An engineer working across three accounts in a week would estimate, at the end of the month, how the time had split between them, and that estimate became the number that went on the client invoice. It was rarely far off, but it was never exact, and exact is what a client is technically paying for.
Support tickets and project tasks also lived in different systems with different vocabularies, so a delivery lead trying to get a true picture of one engineer's week had to check two places and mentally merge them, a process that didn't scale much past a handful of people.
Putting tickets and projects on the same bench, visibly
Five mechanics that turned "who's free" into a question with a real answer.
A support ticket or a change request went into the triage inbox rather than straight to whichever engineer was easiest to reach, so assignment reflected actual availability, visible on the board, instead of convenience.
Each client engagement's board carried its own WIP limit, so a delivery lead couldn't quietly commit an engineer to a sixth thing when their existing boards were already full. The bench's real capacity became a visible number, not a hopeful assumption.
Because logging time was fast enough to do in the moment, hours rolled up by client and project automatically, and the number on the invoice reflected what was actually logged, not a reconstruction from memory weeks later.
An engineer's ticket load and their project commitments showed up on boards inside the same subscription, so a delivery lead could see one person's full week in one place, instead of stitching two systems together by hand.
Instead of asking each delivery lead individually how their accounts were tracking, the owner could see utilization and margin signals across the whole bench in one screen, catching an oversold quarter before it closed rather than after.
After: an invoice that matched the work, and a bench with a real number
The mix of support tickets and project work didn't get simpler, that's the nature of a services business with managed contracts running alongside fixed-scope builds. What changed was that the two kinds of work stopped living in separate systems that had to be reconciled by hand. An engineer's real week, tickets and project tasks together, became visible in one place.
Billing got more accurate because logging hours stopped being a monthly chore and became something that happened as the work happened. And utilization, which used to be a feeling read off who looked stressed in stand-up, became a number the owner could actually check on a Friday, catching an overcommitted bench with enough runway to do something about it before the client noticed.
Questions IT services companies ask
Yes. Both flow through the same triage inbox and can sit on boards scoped to the same client account, so a delivery lead sees one engineer's full commitment, tickets and project tasks together, instead of two disconnected pictures.
It reflects whatever was actually logged. Because logging a day's hours takes about five seconds and sits next to the task just closed, most teams find people log in the moment rather than reconstructing a month later, which makes the number more accurate than a memory-based estimate, though it's still only as good as what gets logged.
No. There are no screenshots, no keystroke logging and no activity tracking anywhere in the product. Utilization is built from logged hours and board activity, which are work outcomes, not a record of what someone was doing minute to minute. Scorecards are leave-adjusted.
Yes, billing for the ShipSprint subscription itself runs in rupees with GST-compliant invoices, and annual billing is available. See pricing for plan details.
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