If you want everyone pulling in the same direction, you need more than “must do better” objectives.
When leadership sets clear outcomes (retention, margin, capacity, customer experience) and those outcomes cascade into Service Desk objectives and individual behaviours, you get:
- Less busywork and fewer random acts of improvement
- Clearer trade-offs (what matters this quarter)
- Better day-to-day decision-making on the Service Desk floor
- Measurable progress you can explain in business language
What does cascading objectives mean?
A cascade flows from top to bottom:
- Leadership objective (business outcome)
- Service Manager/Team objective (what the Service Desk must deliver to enable it)
- Individual objective (what people must do differently, consistently)
Each level needs a small, practical scorecard. Just enough to steer behaviour and spot things going off-track early - rather than finding out at the end of the year that most of the objectives have been missed.
How this fits with a Balanced Scorecard (Leadership View)
If you already use a Balanced Scorecard, cascading objectives is how you stop it becoming a slide deck that never reaches the Service Desk.
Financial: revenue, margin, cost-to-serve, budget variance
Customer: retention, complaints, CSAT
Internal process: SLA achievement, backlog, repeat incidents, CSI delivery
People/learning: training delivery, engagement, capacity to improve
The trick is to pick a small number of measures that connect across the scorecard, then cascading them into what Service Managers and their Teams can influence and implement on.
“But, Michelle”, I hear you cry, “how can a Service Desk Engineer have an impact on Financial objectives???” Well, stick with me, and we’ll jump into that shortly!
Building cascades
Objective Cascade Checklist (SMART, and not fluffy!)
Use this to evaluate your objectives before you cascade anything:
- Specific: does it name the outcome and the scope (which customers/services/teams)?
- Measurable: do we have a KPI (or proxy) we can measure without heroics, or even better add it to a dashboard?
- Achievable: do we have the time, people, and tools to deliver it?
- Relevant: does it clearly support a leadership outcome (not because IT should)? Can also be Realistic if you're overly ambitious and never hit those targets
- Time-bound: is there a review cadence and a point of decision?
Keep the scorecard small
Use KPIs to guide decisions, not to punish people. If you can’t explain how a team member influences the number, it’s not a good KPI for their level.
Use RAG thresholds as scene-setting (then tailor)
RAG (red/amber/green) is there to make performance visible fast. Your thresholds will vary by MSP, tooling, and maturity - treat the examples in the mini scorecards as starting points.
When you are providing updates on RAG items, start with Reds - you’ll need to share a plan to turn them back to Green; then Ambers - make sure you are monitoring these; and you can usually skip the Greens - as they don’t need worrying about.
Set a baseline before you set targets
If you’ve never set measures before, it absolutely makes sense to understand where you are currently operating before setting a target - that way you are not setting yourself up to fail from the start.
- Measure current performance for four weeks
- Set initial RAG thresholds based on what’s actually happening today
- Tighten thresholds quarterly, not weekly
Running this in real life (without it becoming another meeting)
Leadership objectives: set annually (with quarterly checkpoints)
Service management objectives: reported monthly/quarterly (trend + actions)
Individual objectives: monitored more frequently (weekly/fortnightly), focused on behaviours and quality
A simple cadence that works:
Monthly (Leadership): review the leadership KPIs, confirm priorities/trade-offs, and approve CSI themes
Weekly (Service Management): review the service-level KPIs, remove blockers, and decide what gets attention this week
Daily/ongoing (Individuals): focus on the 1-2 behaviours that move the needle (ticket quality, right-first-time, proactive comms)
How this looks in mini scorecards
Customer: Retention + customer experience
Leadership cares about renewals and revenue stability. Service management influences this by improving CSAT and actively managing red-flag customers. Individuals influence it through the quality of their tickets and the feedback they receive.
Financial: Margin
Margin improves when you reduce waste: rework, avoidable escalations, long-running tickets, and failure demand.
People: Microsoft partner status (Infrastructure)
Leadership wants the commercial benefits of partner status, service management ensures the right coverage, and individuals complete and maintain the required training.
Internal Process: ISO/IEC 20000 (service management system)
This is about proving you run service management as a system - not a collection of good intentions. It gives leadership a clear “what good looks like” target, and it forces the organisation to build repeatable, auditable ways of working.
Internal Process: Continual Service Improvement (CSI)
CSI is the engine that stops the Service Desk sliding back into the Wild West. The objective isn’t to “do improvement”, it’s deliver improvement reliably, with accountability.
KPI's
If you want a copy of what those metrics could look like, feel free to download our 300+ MSP Metrics - remember to select only the relevant ones to create the change and make sure to adjust the targets before you implement.
Next steps
If you haven’t got any objectives in place at all, then you’ll want to define and cascade them down to your staff.
If you have objectives in place already, check that the individual objectives support the Teams objectives, and that those then support the business objective. After that, it’s a case of deciding whether they will meet the purpose, whether they need tweaking and sharing, or whether you need to revisit them entirely.
If you’ve got the basics in place and you want to formalise CSI, request an Oprising trial and book your kick-off call. You could use this to create a structured plan, accountability, and a CSI pipeline you can actually run.