Anyone else lose track of one-off IT requests that never turn into real tickets?
anyone else also losing their minds over the amount of drive by requests that hit you daily? Everyday I log in im greeted with multiple heyy quick question request on slack/email. I mostly give them a quick fix and ask them to log a ticket. The problem is…
anyone else also losing their minds over the amount of drive by requests that hit you daily? Everyday I log in im greeted with multiple heyy quick question request on slack/email. I mostly give them a quick fix and ask them to log a ticket. The problem is they NEVER log the ticket. Then few weeks later someone else faces the same issue and the management wants to know why isnt there a ticket or SLA history for it? Acc to them if its not in the system it never happened. But cant give in my hours everyday to manually copy paste Slack DMs into Jira even if its to cover my own ass. How do you guys handle such situations? Do you believe in the no ticket dont care rule? Or do you have a better way to capture this stuff before i lose my sanity?
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It's a ticket or it isn't work.
https://youtu.be/s0vNsH81YeA?t=90s No ticket?
Yeah. Basically I’ve been burned by that a few times and now I’m happy to be an asshole about it. Especially after one of those dickheads once told my boss “but we didn’t need to open a ticket last time” when they were making some request that went to him when I was out. That time, in fact, they did have a ticket because it was tracked on something related that was already open, or there were times I opened something myself on the backend for ongoing small things. But nevertheless it just makes me look bad. So now I just keep it simple. Open a ticket first.
That 2nd one is so overlooked. What’s stopping you from creating a ticket to document the work you just did?
This is the problem, there’s a few people in our department who’ve done that for users and it makes it very difficult to tell said users to use the helpdesk instead. “It’s only a quick one! You did it before!” etc. We did have one user who got annoyed with me on countless occasions when I asked them to use the helpdesk on the basis that “it’ll sit in the queue and not get answered”, but if that’s the case then we need to look into processes on our side. If you’ve not told anyone that your tickets sit there without being answered then we don’t know to fix it. It turned out with that person that they’d had one ticket fall through the cracks a couple of years earlier and refused to put tickets in ever since rather than chasing it for a resolution like our other users do.
My place has a slack channel that makes every thread a ticket. From the perspective of "Cant beat 'em, join 'em!", it works quite well.
OP isn't following their team's process, why would someone external? I've trained users they don't need tickets, and for some reason they think they don't need tickets. Shocked Pikachu face
If you're not going to follow the process I can't assist you. Please have your manager call me and I'll explain.
This is the way. If I get an email, I might forward it to the ticketing system but then it sits in an unimportant queue until someone picks it up.
"Drive by tickets" 😅 "my inbox is not a ticketing system"
It's neither a ticket nor work, because it's made up by a bot account posting LLM generated content.
You have 2 solutions: don't do the work until they log a ticket don't do the work until you log a ticket
that's what i keep telling myself, but my inner helpdesk goblin still answers the slack pings hahahaha
Privately; Yes, all the time. Publicly; Um...when did you ask me this? I've been really busy, and you might have caught me at a time when I was both physically and mentally juggling half a dozen major issues.
"I'm busy right now but as soon as I see the ticket come in I will clear some time to look at this for you" works wonders and helps train users to follow the official channels
if I get a call or walkin and I know Im likely I'll answer affirmatively but ask for an email as a reminder and preemptively setup the excuse of or else I'm likely to forget as I'm in the middle of something and am likely to get distracted 2 or three more times before I can get to it
By solving those one-off requests, you are encouraging them to message you when they have problems, because you fix their problems when they message you. If you say something simple like "Sure, can you submit that via the helpdesk? Once I see it there, I'll pick it up and work it" Then next week when they ask for the status, you have an uno-reverse card. "Oh, I didn't see the ticket last week. The system emails you the ticket number when you submit one. What is it? Oh you don't have one in your email? Well, can you submit that via the helpdesk? Once I see it there, I'll pick it up and work it" Problem solved
This is exactly why I don't give people what they need until they give me what I need. Because if I give them what they want they're never going to give me what I need. For example, there was this QA manager. He needed access to an AWS environment. Before I got started I said, " is there a task that you need completed right now that you want me to complete so it's out of the way while we're granting you access" he said no go ahead and just grab me the access. So I'm granting him the access and it's a new type of access so I'm giving him one group at a time just to make sure he gets just what he needs. And he's getting further and each time I'll give him another group to get him just to the next phase. And this is taking maybe a minute and a half and we're one step away from being done right. So then he says can you just do this thing for me and then give me access. And I say no. And I said no for two reasons one was because I already asked him if he wanted me to do that and he said no but also we're literally two seconds from being done. But the main reason I didn't do the task for him was because if I had he wouldn't have tested the access and would have come back to me two days later saying hey man I still don't have access what's the deal. Once you give someone what they need they're never going to do what you ask them to do. I had this other manager saying hey I need to give universal access to this Confluence thing and he was being a pain in the ass so I said this is where you do it. And of course he just went and made the change and then didn't communicate with me at all. But I was smart enough to be watching to see what he was doing because I knew he wasn't going to get back to me. It doesn't always work because some executive is probably going to bulldoze you at some point but you basically have to hold their request hostage. You have to say submit a ticket and I'll take care of it. You have to make them think you're not going to take care of their issue until they submit that ticket
I would always do my best when these types of off handed requests would come in, but I always told people if you don’t make a ticket I’ll probably forget before I have time to take care of it. Set expectations upfront.
"sure. Open a ticket and I'll get right on that." This is 100% a process not being followed problem and it's on you.
No ticket, no click it. Send them through the process and tell them why.
It’s extremely simple. I don’t. Stop responding to people that do that. or ask them what the ticket number is. tell them you can’t work on it if there isn’t one. don’t let them reference a ticket for some other issue either.
No ticky, no worky
I mean, that is the point of having a robust ticketing system, no? If people can't be bothered to log a ticket for it, it couldn't have been that important. It's not your job to keep track of these completely undocumented requests. That's what the ticketing system is there for. It's the users' job to log their own requests. If you don't believe in "no ticket don't care", then the next best thing is that undocumented requests receive "best efforts" only, i.e. least priority, and least mental attention. If you happen to forget about it before it gets done, well that's their fault for not logging it.
Log a ticket. Have them log a ticket first. My favorite: “send me the ticket number and I’ll take a look as soon as I free up”. Or some variation of asking for the ticket number. At least 9/10 times if they haven’t already opened a ticket they’ll submit on then send it over.