When do you create a ticket for tracking an issue?

[pete]

Mods: I'm not sure the best place for this, move if it should be more ICT policies.

 

When do _you_ (not teachers) create a ticket to track an issue, for your / your technical colleagues benefit? My general rule of thumb is if the job is likely to take more than 5* minutes and/or requires input from non-it-person or external person to proceed.

 

As anyone who's ever done the "write down all the things you do today" experiment (you quickly get to 11am and 3 sheets of A4 and then give up) knows, I'd like the ticketing to be useful rather than a chore.

 

So how do you do it?

[srochford]

As an IT manager, i really want *everything* to be ticketed - that way you can do some sort of analysis of what's going on. For example, you probably get lots of "I've forgotten my password" requests. It takes seconds to fix this but it needs logging. You can then see if it's general (everyone forgets their password once a month) or confined to individuals. If it's the latter then you can kick ass (or other appropriate training) but unless you have stats to back it up it's really difficult!

 

If the tracking system is too cumbersome then could you have a much simpler system to track quick jobs - maybe a box to enter username and a drop down to pick type of task. that should only take seconds to complete but will give some useful info.

[GrumbleDook]

Same here .. ticket everything. Every password change. very time you got a call to sort out a printer not being turned on ... everything.

 

If you look at FITS you have to remember that the helpdesk is just the start. Service desk, incident management ... and then you get problem management. Analysing all the information. How many hours you spend telling people the same thing highlights training issues. How many time particular hardware fails can point towards what needs replacing in your next lot of spending, etc ...

 

Of course ... this is presuming you have time to do the analysis some would say ... my response is to make time. An extra day or two now can save you weeks later on.

[budgester]

Yup, everything gets ticketed, well except for posts on edugeek.

 

Our exams officer doubles up as our helpdesk, not technical but she can change passwords.

[localzuk]

I try to ticket everything. It may seem like it causes hassle, but after a month or so, when you see that 1 person has taken most of your time, or that a single PC is breaking all the time, you can solve things much easier.

[pete]

Hmm, a lot of our tasks/issues are solved with a 10-second "ok, if you just do $foo it'll work" . I realise the benefit of tracking all those 10-second jobs, I'm just aware that tracking each issue (we'll sometime get 3 or 4 in the time it takes me to write this) increases the time dedicated to it that could be used for other things.

[Guest drewinc]

All IT related requests here including password changes and anything trivial are ticketed - at first instance staff create the tickets themselves - If I receive an email or phone call with a request I ask staff to create a ticket on the helpdesk. This allows us to respond to support calls in a timely fashion rather than everyone wanting everything right now. Staff used to send pupils with slips of paper to our office -- now we send them back with a slip saying use the helpdesk :-)

[pallen]

For those people who ticket everything, how do you do it? Is it a case that ANY task requested is done using official Job request forms (paper or online) before you will action them? My reasoning is that a lot of my job comes from pupil X has a problem printing. I ask what the problem is and the reply is I cant print. I realise you can send them away to fill in the apropriate form before you do anything, but in doing so you are going to get the teachers complaing that it is effecting the teaching and learning of the kids.

 

I keep a log of what I do, but when I am busy, I will often not log problems which are in the classroom. You know the type, you go in to fix 1 problem and when you arrive there are 3 more. I can see that this can be solved by staff using the correct procedures for support. But my question is, how did you get past the fact that staff want help immediately when a problem happens in their lesson? By forcing then to use a ticket system themselves do teachers look at you as being a hinderance rather than a help?

 

Currently here, staff fill in a paper request form(which are hardly ever filled in enough to know what the problem is). What I would like to do is introduce an online ticket system which staff can use to create a job themselves but I know I will have a hard time enforcing this system. Has anyone got any comments on how they managed to do it?

[KarlGoddard]

another 'ticket everything' here. Can be a pain in the butt when you've got several lower school asking for passwords to be reset at the same time as dozens of year 11 asking for increases in quota, and staff asking for pupil x to be removed from the internet all at the same time!!!!

 

Staff can submit their own calls through a web interface or we enter the call if the request is phoned through. We still accept 'corridor requests' from staff and we enter these when we get back to our desks - not very FITS I know

 

But the real value I want to start extracting from our call database is using closed calls to form a knowledge base. That's probably possible out of the box with a specific application, but we use a home brew app created by our IT Manager.

 

Looking back now it's hard to see how I actually coped with only my A4 pad and a pen......

[gaz350]

we now use spiceworks help desk. Staff find it easier to use as few systems as possible and they seem to be happier sending an email to our heldesk email address than using a web page.

If its something more than a password change then it gets logged. When im out and about i just send a short email from my iphone, and add the appropriate details in it later.

Edited May 19, 2008 by gaz350