The model costs a directly hired Philippines technician at $15 an hour fully burdened. At 173.33 paid hours a month, that's about $2,600, or $2,990 with its 15% night differential. Managing offshore teams still requires a roster, an accepted handover, and an onshore lead who owns the work.
The differential applies when the technician covers your business hours during their night shift. The model doesn't add it when your after-hours work falls in their daytime. These are model inputs from an operator's costs, not a universal employment quote or a substitute for your actual arrangement.
My test for the plan is what it does to the board on Monday morning. The next ticket needs an owner who is actually working and knows how to get help. A lower hourly rate doesn't answer either question.
Write the Hours Both People Will Work
Put the agreed coverage in the roster in both local time zones. Check the actual dates, including changes in the onshore clocks, rather than copying an offset indefinitely. The technician and the receiving lead should both confirm when responsibility begins and ends.
Name the cover for breaks and absence. Establish who the technician contacts if they can't work or lose their normal connection, with a backup communication route. A shift shown as covered in a spreadsheet needs a real replacement decision when that person is unavailable.
Keep paid hours distinct from productive capacity. The model's 173.33 monthly hours price the person; they don't mean every hour can be spent resolving tickets. Plan the work and the required handovers within the capacity your actual team can provide.
Don't describe a night shift as a growth hack. It is a working schedule with a person attached. Have the service lead check the workload and coverage rather than treating an employment start date as proof that the queue is staffed.
Keep the Onshore Tier 3 Lead Visible
In the model's offshore option, Tier 1 and Tier 2 work and alerts move to Philippines staff while Tier 3 stays onshore as the team lead. The base model remains onshore. Use the option's role boundary deliberately instead of assuming location alone determines which work someone can handle.
For the Tier 1 role, define the work the technician is trained and authorized to resolve. Name the onshore lead who accepts escalations and decides what happens to blocked work. Keep projects and onboarding with the onshore project-engineer arrangement the model uses.
Check when that lead is available. If the offshore schedule extends beyond their coverage, define the agreed escalation and on-call route for that period. Don't imply that an onshore specialist is continuously available because their name appears in the procedure.
Give the lead responsibility for assignment quality too. A technician should know when to ask for help and where that request goes. Don't make waiting quietly for the other country to wake up part of the service design.
Make the Handover an Accepted Transfer
Keep the handover with the work in the PSA. Chat can alert the next person, but the ticket needs the record they will use. A message saying still investigating leaves the next technician with an instruction to start again.
| Handover Field | What the Receiving Person Needs |
|---|---|
| Ticket and client | The actual record and affected service |
| Reported impact | What the client says is prevented, distinguished from verified findings |
| Work already completed | The relevant checks and their outcomes, with evidence references |
| Current blocker | The access, information, or technical dependency preventing progress |
| Next action | The proposed action and the person authorized and able to perform it |
| Client commitment | The agreed next update and who will send it |
| Receiving owner | Who has accepted the work or which lead must resolve an unaccepted handoff |
Have the receiving technician or lead acknowledge the transfer. Keep ownership explicit until that happens, including what the outgoing person should do when the shift ends before acceptance. The lead needs a path for that exception rather than an assumption that the departing technician will stay online indefinitely.
The handover isn't complete when the message reaches the ocean. Check whether someone accepted the next action. The same rule belongs between local colleagues; distance just makes the missing decision harder to ignore.
Give the Technician the Same Working Standard
The model calls for a standard stack and training on it. Give the offshore technician the current procedures relevant to their role and a way to flag a missing or incorrect instruction. Reading a document once doesn't establish that the person can perform the work.
Have the lead check a representative task with the technician before assigning that task independently. Use the approved access and change process during that check. Don't compensate for missing documentation by handing over a broader administrative account.
Keep client context where the technician can use it through the authorized system. They need to know which business service is affected and which commitments apply. Keep credentials in your approved access process rather than copying them into handover notes.
If an instruction fails, identify the correction owner. Decide whether the technician needs coaching, the procedure needs updating, or the task requires a different resource. An escalation alone doesn't establish which of those explanations is right.
Review the Work at Handover and in Coaching
At handover, have the lead check unaccepted work and promises that are approaching their next update. Use the existing service review to examine resolved work and repeat problems. Adjust the coaching time to the work you observe instead of borrowing a meeting duration from another MSP.
The model allocates 65% of tickets to Tier 1 resolution. That is a workload assumption, not an individual quota or a first-contact resolution measure. Review what the technician actually handled before deciding that a different tier mix means poor performance.
Look at the technical outcome and the handover quality together. A high closure count can coexist with repeat work or a colleague reconstructing the case. Give the technician specific feedback on the action and the record, then verify the next attempt.
- The service lead owns the roster and makes the replacement decision when coverage changes.
- The offshore technician owns the current ticket record and raises blockers through the agreed route.
- The receiving technician or lead owns acknowledgement of the next action at handover.
- The onshore Tier 3 lead owns escalation decisions and task-specific coaching.
- The documentation owner corrects the procedure and confirms which staff need the update.
- The MSP owner checks actual staffing cost and service capacity against the arrangement being purchased.
Keep the quality standard consistent across locations. Compare like work and investigate the reason for a difference before turning it into a judgement about a country. The management question is whether this person has the capability, access, and support to perform the assigned role.
Take the next handover through the ticket record with both people present. Confirm the working hours, the receiving owner, and the escalation path that will exist during that shift. Resolve the first missing dependency before relying on the arrangement to carry more work.
mspoutpost.com/articles/managing-offshore-teams-hours-handover-and-standards
Written by Megan Friesen
MSP Outpost publishes information, not legal, financial, insurance, tax or compliance advice, and reading it creates no professional relationship. For decisions about your business, talk to a qualified professional.