When a prospect tells us their last MSP kept losing tickets, nine times out of ten it isn't laziness or understaffing. It's a routing problem nobody on the floor is measuring. The ticket came in, nobody owned the category, and it sat in a shared queue until someone noticed the client was angry.
The metric that exposes the problem
The number we audit first is time-to-assignment: how long from ticket creation until a human owner is named on the ticket. Not first reply. Not resolution. Assignment. Once you have a clean median and p95 on that number, broken out by category — security, M365, hardware, network — the routing failures fall out of the data on their own. Almost every failure is a category with no clear default owner.
How to fix routing in a week
Pull the last 90 days of tickets and tag each one with a category. For each category, identify a primary owner and a backup — write it down somewhere everyone reads. Stand up an unowned queue that someone is responsible for. Re-measure time-to-assignment after two weeks. For the clients we run today, median time-to-assignment sits around 6 minutes during business hours. None of that requires a 24/7 SOC. It requires a category owner and a queue nobody is allowed to ignore.
I started fixing computers as a kid in my family's print shop, and the puzzle stuck. Give me a hard problem, and I'll stay with it until it's solved. That's still what I do today. I own the security baseline across our client portfolio and lead incident response, so when something goes wrong, I'm the one who answers. CompTIA A+ certified and CJIS certified at the Privileged Role level.