Tickets are sometimes associated more with the help desk than with the operations group of an internal IT department. Unfortunately, when this is the case, system administrators are missing out on an opportunity to use tickets for their own purposes. Sometimes, administrators can see tickets as a barrier to efficiency and agility. But this is not the case. Tickets are a communication and change control tool. All work done by the IT staff should be tracked in a ticket. This is important for several reasons:
- Other administrators can understand what is happening with a particular effort.
- End users can be kept in the loop on the status of issues affecting them.
- The administrator doing the work has a log of all the steps they have taken which can be useful if they ever need to perform the same task again, or if they need to go in and back out some portion of the change.
- The manager can quickly and easily understand the workload of the staff.
Organizations that do not use tickets throughout the IT department tend to fall into one or more of three common IT traps:
The first trap is that work is being duplicated. When administrators do not have a clear and reliable way to let other administrators know what they are working on, more than one person can be working on the same task without knowing it. This is a waste of everyone's time and can cause lots of problems if two people are making changes to a system at the same time. The second trap is that work falls through the cracks. Again, when work is not clearly tracked, it is easy for things to get lost. Even if there is no one who has the availability to work on a task, if a ticket is created then that task does not get forgotten. An administrator can grab the ticket when she is able and then complete it. Tasks jotted down on a sticky note for future reference have a way of getting lost and never found. The third trap is when administrators find themselves spending most of their time reacting to broken systems and networks. This is related to tickets because when changes are clearly planned, approved, tested, and tracked, it is easy to know what changes are having what impacts. When systems go down, the tickets can be reviewed to see if there were any changes around the time of system failure, and those changes can be backed out. Without a reliable tracking mechanism, hours can be spent trying to figure out who did what and when. Administrators who control their systems and what changes are being made will get fewer out-of-hours pages, and they will have more time to do the fun, proactive administrative tasks.
There are several good, free ticketing systems available. You can compare many, many of them side by side here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_issue_tracking_systems.
Image credit to Flickr user 536.