Documenting technical issues

Ticketing systems

Does your organization track technical issues through something other than a spreadsheet? Do you analyze issues and potential downtimes through analytics?

An IT ticketing system creates a diary of daily issues and resolution times. Some systems provide analytics, automatic notifications for escalations, and reports. These reports can help you track performance by help desk, issues by departments or individuals, and provide average resolution times.

Open ticket reports can help identify problem areas in training for support personnel and issues with technical infrastructure. Most importantly, they can report downtime that affects productivity! If this isn't tracked daily, a simple 5-minute issue affecting 30 people results in 150 minutes of lost productivity.

A good ticket system will allow you to track a ticket through its life cycle. It will show who worked on it, how long was spent on the attempt, and what was done. End-user access to the system allows transparency and updates for the reporter of the issue.

There are a lot of benefits to a ticket system. From identifying company wide issues to the competency of your help desk staff. Most ticket systems are based around the ITIL foundation.

What is ITIL? IT Infrastructure Library Framework.

IT loves their acronyms, that is what makes us, us. The concept that there is already a wheel and reinvention is not necessary is the principal of ITIL, that and the concept of “Continual improvement” which embraces the concept that although there is already a procedure for doing something, there is always room for improvement.

ITIL defines the support path from customer service and interactions to the steps involved in resolving an issue. ITIL defines terms like SLA (Service Level agreements) which defines the expected level of service:

• Uptime/availability: guaranteed availability of services (99.9% uptime)

• Performance metrics- Specific measurable targets like time to respond or time to resolve, number of tickets received and resolved

• Responsiveness: Timeframe for acknowledging and fixing issues

• Penalties: if the provider fails to meet targets.

These metrics and agreements matter because they establishe clear performance requirements. They define the level of service and what constitutes the difference between poor and excellent performane. Most importantly this will outline the financial repercussions of downtime and poor customer service VS a finely tuned support team.

Let me know what system you use and what you think it could do better. In my opinion, a minimum requirement for help desk training would be ITIL Fundamentals. Google offers an affordable help desk course through their partner college Coursera.org . This is an extensive and comprehensive course that will prepare anybody wishing to enter the world of IT. It is also a wonderful refresher course for those of us who already know everything. I just went through it and I must say that after 30+ years in the industry, I learned things I did not know that I did not know. LOL

Questions? Reach out to me via email gilbert.landin@gmail.com