Msp onboarding process

The two tracks

The technical track is discovery, agent deployment, documentation, backup and monitoring verification, and the incumbent handover. The client-facing track is contacts and approvals, how their staff raise tickets and when they are told, scope and what is chargeable, billing setup, and the go-live communication. Different owners, different skills, and one date they both have to hit.

What happens when only one is planned

The technical work completes and the service starts without the client's staff knowing it has, which produces a first month of tickets raised the old way, approvals sought from the wrong people and an invoice nobody expected. Every one of those is cheap to prevent and expensive to apologise for, and none of them is an engineering failure.

The shared artefact

One list, two sections, one go-live date, visible to both owners. Not a merged checklist, because the technical section is meaningless to the account side and vice versa, but a single place where both tracks show their outstanding items against the same date. That is the minimum coordination and it is usually all that is missing.

Where it stalls

The incumbent. Documentation, credentials and cooperation from an outgoing provider are the highest-variance part of the whole process and the part you control least. Agreeing early, with the client, exactly what you need from the incumbent and who is asking for it is the only lever that reliably helps.