1.5. Ticketing Helps Everybody

Ticketing systems are good for multiple purposes and for many different people in different circumstances. Let's step back from the company or group perspective and look at how a ticket system benefits individuals.

1.5.1. What Ticketing Does for You

From a personal perspective, a ticketing system enables you to collect tasks in a list, assign a priority or status to it so the system can automatically order the list, and more or less forget about it until it's time to work on it. Deciding what to do next is simply a matter of looking up the most critical item and doing that task. The system decides on your behalf what is the most urgent task based on attributes you set.

A ticketing system also helps you manage your time more efficiently and avoid working on three or four things at once and not getting any of them done. You simply do the current task, mark it closed, and move on down the list. This is a bit like a shopping list: you can go to the checkout when everything on the list the prerequisites for this shop is in the basket. Once the checkout phase is complete, you move on to the next shop. Millions of people do this everyday, all around the world. They are using an unsophisticated ticketing system, the shopping list, which is ideal for a simple and solitary activity.

However, if you are involved in a large organization, you may work with a number of people from separate departments, and your job may involve multiple different tools and interrelated tasks. A ticketing system can simplify your complex and interrelated tasks to behave like a shopping list for your environment. Select an open ticket, work through the involved tasks, if there are any unfinished dependencies close them first, then close the parent ticket.

Divide and conquer, simplify and close.

1.5.2. What Ticketing Does for Your Team

Perhaps you manage a team of people, all working on vaguely related tasks. Each time a new task arrives for your department, you assign it to one or more people based on their apparent availability and skill set. The task may be a customer request, a production change, a system failure bug report or whatever it is that your department handles.

If you are using an effective ticketing system, you can easily find helpful information like the number of outstanding tasks, the status of all the submitted work this week, who is not overloaded, and who has more work than they can reasonably handle. You can locate essential tasks that are still open, and assign the merely nice-to-have tasks to the back-burner by simply changing the status of a ticket on a web page.

Members of your team can cross-assign tasks to other members when they're overworked, or find another team member who is more of an expert on a particular task. They can assign the expert to the ticket as an interested party or may even transfer ownership altogether.

This kind of system ensures high visibility. The entire team will always know the overall state of the tasks at hand what needs doing and who should be doing it. Everyone will know who needs to pull their weight more and who is doing too much. There is always a balance to be found. This information will bring in, all by itself, peer pressure to get your list of tickets closed. Everyone will probably want to have closed the most tickets this week, particularly if this is tied to a bonus scheme. The bonus scheme may be targeted to the team, not necessarily to the individual, but the incentive and result remains the same your team will become a more effective self-managing unit.

1.5.3. What Ticketing Does for Your Accountants

The accountants, or whoever watches the company profits, are essentially concerned with getting something for nothing or less.

A ticketing system will allow accountants to keep track of all the tasks requested from your group a series of support requests, for example and which tasks you've completed. They may be able to charge for each opened ticket, but they may only be able to charge a substantial sum or bonus for closed tickets, or for tickets closed within a specified period of time.

An automated tracking system enables accountants to make economic decisions based on real throughput of work, as well as to charge immediately for completed work, rather than waiting for this information to filter through an inefficient manual system. If the work is ticket-based, they could even automatically generate profit and loss forecasts based entirely on the contents of the ticketing system itself.

All of this makes a ticketing system a must for any bean-counter worth her salt.

1.5.4. What Ticketing Does for Your Boss

Your boss is not only responsible for giving work out to you and other employees. She must track the entire workforce, the work it is doing, and the outstanding work. She feeds reports back to her management in turn. Most bosses are only bosses relatively speaking, and report to higher management, shareholders, or their partners.

The boss provides summaries of the current state of progress, which go all the way up the food chain. The best way she can satisfy continual requests for status updates is to use the predefined views in the ticketing system to generate a suitable report. If these views are not sufficient, then the system needs to be able to produce flexible reports tailored to the relevant purpose.

Keeping your boss happy is an important part of a good ticketing system.