Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
If oncall shifts are too long, the oncall person will be overloaded with follow-up work.
If the shifts are too close together, there will not be time to complete the follow-up work.
Many great ideas for new projects and improvements are first imagined while servicing
alerts. Between oncall shifts people should have enough time to pursue such projects.
Chapter 14
will discuss oncall in greater detail.
Ticket Duty Days
Ticketdutydaysarespentworkingonrequestsfromcustomers.Herethecustomersarethe
internal users of the service, such as other service teams that use your service's API. These
are not tickets from external users. Those items should be handled by customer support
representatives.
While oncall is expected to have very fast reaction time, tickets generally have an ex-
pected response time measured in days.
Typical tickets may consist of questions about the service, which can lead to some con-
sulting on how to use the service. They may also be requests for activation of a service,
reports of problems or difficulties people are experiencing, and so forth. Sometimes tickets
arecreatedbyautomatedsystems.Forexample,amonitoringsystemmaydetectasituation
that is not so urgent that it needs immediate response and may open a ticket instead.
Some long-running tickets left from the previous shift may need follow-up. Often there
is a policy that if we are waiting for a reply from the customer, every three days the cus-
tomer will be politely “poked” to make sure the issue is not forgotten. If the customer is
waiting for follow-up from us, there may be a policy that urgent tickets will have a status
update posted daily, with longer stretches of time for other priorities.
Ifaticketwillnotbecompleted bytheendofashift,itsstatusshouldbeincludedinthe
shift report so that the next person can pick up where the previous person left off.
By dedicating a person to ticket duty, that individual can be more focused while re-
sponding to tickets. All tickets can be triaged and prioritized. There is more time to cat-
egorize tickets so that trends can be spotted. Efficiencies can be realized by batching up
similar tickets to be done in a row. More importantly, by dedicating a person to tickets,
thatindividualshouldhavetimetogodeeperintoeachticket:toupdatedocumentationand
playbooks along the way, to deep-dive into bugs rather than find superficial workarounds,
to fix complex broken processes. Ticket duty should not be a chore, but rather should be
part of the strategy to reduce the overall work faced by the team.
Every operations team should have a goal of eliminating the need for people to open
tickets with them, similar to how there should always be a goal to automate manual pro-
cesses. A ticket requesting information is an indication that documentation should be im-
proved. It is best to respond to the question by adding the requested information to the
Search WWH ::
Custom Search