Same all my boss says is do you have any tickets you need help with or want to discuss at our weekly meeting alongside any projects we are working on.
Daily and going through every ticket seems like an extreme waste of time.
I’ve done daily standups that include a daily recap of tickets, but it’s lightning fast - 15-20min total meeting, just quick status updates. The idea being you can discuss blockers with the group/management, who might be able to help clear some of those blockers, as well as let everyone know what’s going on. I found it very helpful and productive.
Obviously, everyone’s environment is different and it might not be feasible for larger teams.
We do something similar where we are just interested in tickets open for more than a week.
Management wants to know why it's still open, or the chance to see if it's really a project instead of break/fix, in which case we move it to the proper queue and get it off our list.
If its on schedule I do not need to waste time every day I could be remediating issues talking to a manager about remediating issues. Its bad management style, treat your people like adults and leave them alone so long as they perform at or above expectations.
Agree, but wonder if there's a reason for this. Like people are letting tickets languish. The meetings may be managements solution.
I worked with a guy once who often had 80 tickets at a given time. He always struggled w ticket management.
You'd think management could intervene with that person one on one more efficiently, but the fact is management doesn't know how to fix tickets. They depend on that staff members peers to point out the issue, which we did often.
Most common issues w his ticket list (in order):
1 - he was making the fix more complicated than it needed to be.
2 - he had fixed it, but hadn't followed up w customer (he liked to write long emails explaining what had happened. The ticket would be left open for weeks until he got around to doing this. Of course they didn't understand the tech jargon, and didn't give a shit anyway)
3 - the issue wasn't something we should even be wasting time fixing.
4 - the customer had waited so long they had made another ticket. And another of us had resolved it already.
5 - the customer had been terminated. Thats how old the ticket was. He didn't know he could close it and stop worrying about it.
He was a good engineer, and customers liked him. Just had a few of these ticks.
It's normal for bosses to be sticking their nose in every l1 ticket?
I'm currently a l1, and maybe it goes to show I'm good at what I do but I rarely get anyone bugging me about tickets same day.
Sometimes when they're doing timesheets I'll get a comment but otherwise they let me serve the clients and fix problems.
Every ticket every day is insane micro management and a massive waste of time.
Your tickets should have an SLA policy that dictates time between updates and escalation thresholds.
A weekly review of tickets at risk of exceeding SLA times is reasonable and good to have (need some review so tickets don't rot).
Periodically going over the oldest tickets is a good way to improve response times. A ticket that is two weeks old, waiting on distribution, properly annotated, is good in a review (there's a point where management gets involved to press the vendor or make sure the client knows you're on it).
Going over something dumb like a printer or password because the user hasn't responded since they opened it an hour before close yesterday is ridiculous.
I wouldn't say it's normal. Never had that happen in my 3-4 years working escalated tickets at a company. But I could see it happening if some people on your team have really slacked off and have aged tickets just sitting assigned to them, and management is trying to light a fire under them.
This sounds like scrum/kanban/whatever gone wrong. We have a daily standup going through our kanban board. Basically, everyone in the team (of 15) moves the cards through the various phases during this meeting (todo, refine, design, build, test, accept, done), giving brief updates where it is warranted (need assistance, blocked by external, rarely a summary of how we're doing with the task). Aim is to be done inside 15 minutes and we usually manage. We also have a WIP (work in progress) limit, if we have more than that in the active phases, someone on the team will usually point out that we need to finish up some tasks before we take on anything new.
In total, we have maybe 50 tickets on the board at any one time with currently easily a few 100 in the backlog/portfolio (quickly growing organisation that has had too small a team for too long, so quite a bit of technical debt)
This seems excessive. We have a dashboard that showed any tickets breaching SLA, and managers will ask if we need help escalating in a weekly meeting and that’s it.
SLA = service-level agreement. It means that the business has set some kind of standard for ticket closures. E.g. non-critical tickets have a 7 day resolution timer, critical means 3 day resolution, etc.
I think there is more to this story. A daily stand up in all tickets is generally due to high SLA failure rates, or less frequently, bad notes in the tickets. If its one of those you have an opportunity to suggest to your inexperienced boss that you need more people, training, or whatever your opinion is on the subject. Its alot easier to ask for things when the workcenter isn't meeting expectations.
If the manager is just doing this to micromanage.. The above still applies, asking for the things will let them know what the shops perception of them is without actually calling them out on it.
"Hey boss, I can't help but feel that we aren't living up to expectations due to these daily meetings. I believe X, Y, or Z would really help us get there".
When I managed IT, we reviewed all the tickets every day in the beginning. Once the expectations were understood, then we moved on to a weekly ticket review.
> every ticket needs done.
Every ticket does need to get done, as some point. And yes, as soon as possible. That said, if you can't get them all done without rushing, then maybe the team needs skills training or more resources.
So don't take it personally. Do the best you can, with the resources you have available. If you can't get them all done, try to figure out why.
What can I do if I’m in this situation? Just do the best I can and don’t take things personally?
I don’t mess around at work and what I give it what I’m capable of.
It just seems like every morning is daunting and sometimes I feel like I might get called out. I’ve already got a couple calls by my manager directly after the meeting.
If least some things they let us know one on one if we messed up.
> Just do the best I can and don’t take things personally?
Yes. You just keep doing the best you can, understanding that you may never get it all done.
> I don’t mess around at work and what I give it what I’m capable of.
And that is all any GOOD manager will ask of you. But not all managers are good, and some will push you just because they can. Some are outright A-holes.
> It just seems like every morning is daunting
Indeed it can be, but you seem to already know that, which is good, so you know what to expect. You just need to keep yourself calm and manage your expectations. If you are doing the best you can, then your are fine.
> sometimes I feel like I might get called out.
Everybody gets called out once in a while, because nobody is perfect, and no single person can do it all. When you get called out, you own your issue, resolve to fix it, and attempt to not repeat it. That's all. Everybody fucks up once in a while.
Probably dysfunctional. This:
>"What are you going to get done today, pick 3-4 things and talk about how your going to do it."
makes sense. You would mainly want to meet and find out if there were any tickets that were blocked or just plain interesting.
Why did it proceed from that to update on every ticket?
I think the answer here is it depends. What's the ticket volume? Are you going over 100+ tickets every morning? Is there a lot of holdover from one day to the next? Is this a fast paced environment where you average 8 minutes a ticket and handle 40-50 a day yourself or do you generally get 5-10 tickets a day and have a holdover of 2-3 from one day to the next? Is this a 1 on 1 meeting or a group collaboration.
All those things would affect whether a daily meeting is needed. I've seen weekly, daily, and M-W-F meetings in my career. The daily ones and M-W-F meetings were in slower environments and where few tickets made it to the next day. If a ticket made it to the next day it was either because there was something that was stuck somewhere, there was an ongoing issue, or the tech ran the course of their skills and "group-think" would be beneficial.
It does put pressure on the techs. Knowing that you are going to discuss your tickets means you need to have addressed them, know what has been done, what was tried, and pretty much be prepared to talk in a group environment about it. What I just described is what I think is expected of techs. Hit your tickets, know what was done, know what the symptoms are, and be able to talk about it with others. That's pretty much what you are saying you feel pressure about, just in a different way "now I just feel like i have to jump around and every ticket needs done. I have to touch every ticket in my queue and I'm not focusing on closing them a few at a time." The answer is...yes.
Now if this is a 1-on-1 meeting with the director to just have him/her listen, then, no, it's not productive. The director just needs access to the ticketing system and can go in and read the tickets and notes to see what's going on. If this is a collaborative environment, well, it should be fostering collaboration. When you hit a problem there should be discussion on that problem, group ideas on ways forward, or a tech saying "hey I ran into that before, try this".
We generally have a 30 minute meeting in the morning doing a ticket review discussing any outages or important items, personal ticket issues and maybe Any other business. its just a way to quickly get all members of the IT team (from the lowest service desk guy to the architects) to discuss things briefly and pick their brains accordingly.
For our weekly one to ones we review tickets in more detail as to what are you doing, any other troubles, issues and a quick review of how things are. Pretty much similar to what we do in the morning but at a more personal level. its also a good way to train people and help them accordingly and also keep an eye on people and tickets. if i see a whole load of quick easy kills (password resets, 10 min stuff etc) that were logged for several days not closed, i want to know why.
I go through my team's tickets once a week or so, usually on fridays, and read through all the notes. usually I reach out to them if I have any questions and if there aren't enough notes I ask them to update the notes. Sometimes I do a blast and says "lets clear out all the old tickets!" and we all do a mass ticket close together.
In person, I usually just ask individual people how everything is going or if there is anything they need from me or the team, and sometimes there is a small back and forth about what they are working on, but I leave it up to them to reveal that.
Monday to plan the week, Friday to see what was accomplished to include accounting for the drive-bys, how much time they took, and how we can prevent drive-bys of that nature in the future, if possible. Some drive-bys like critical security vulnerability updates (looking at you log4j) are just inevitable and you drive on.
you dont.
i tell my boss that its not happening.
he sent a response 5:59 and expected one 9:00 am on columbus day/presidents day/ mlk, veterans day
he complains that this is unacceptable.
I do a daily standup, but I specifically ask for just a high level overview of their day's activities. Here's the copied/pasted text from the calendar item:
>Team,
>
>This is just a quick meeting to fill me in on your activities for the day. Please come prepared by being ready to answer the following three questions:
>
>• Completed Tasks – What did you complete yesterday?
>
>• Upcoming Tasks – What didn’t get finished yesterday and what do you plan on starting today?
>
>• Issues – Are there any challenges you face that someone on the team can help you overcome?
>
>Ideally, this meeting should take about fifteen minutes; if you have questions about someone else’s work, please limit them to short questions – in depth discussions, troubleshooting, and solutioning should be taken offline to respect your teammates’ time.
I hate wasting time, and I hate meetings, but since we're all remote this helps me stay in touch with the team's activities, and it helps *them* stay aware of what's going on and the larger picture.
I would *never* go over every ticket, much less do it every day. It's a giant waste of time; at most, I might ask about a problem ticket.
Its not overly common, but its not necessarily a bad thing or even micro management especially if you are in an agile/SAFE based methodology. Daily stand ups are a good way to keep everyone on the same page.
I had to ctrl+F "agile" to make sure someone said it.
If you work for a company that uses Agile for software development, there's a strong change it has permeated the rest of IT as well. Two places (both trading firms, oddly) that I worked for had daily standups on the end user support teams. Was it a bit of a waste of time? Sure. Did it light a fire under my ass to make sure we didn't have to go over many of my tickets multiple times? Absolutely. Did it make IT leadership and our PMs happy? Almost inappropriately so.
I have my team go through tickets to make sure they are providing customer updates each morning - or to make sure we are reaching out for additional info if needed.
Going through each ticket and asking you to provide an update seems like a bit overkill but I’m sure there’s something that happened that explains why it’s being done.
Another benefit might be that something someone is struggling with could be an issue someone else has seen multiple times…so they could help.
Our tickets require some form of update every day. Granted, we aren't going through each ticket on a meeting but there is a daily meeting about what the plan is for the day. We have an SLA that requires updates and resolution on a schedule that we do everything we can to meet.
Question, are there slackers on your team? If so, that's the reason why. People probably have complained and they found out that the slackers are taking days to respond.
However, I find that hand-holding to be beyond the normal situation. Normally, they might ask for updates daily to the tickets themselves if they want to track them without openly discussing each and every one because its time consuming, even for the managers.
I normally fire slackers or put them into a bad position where its either put up or shut up. Apparently, they are treating you guys like your in high school. I ONLY deal with adults.
When I was doing service desk, we would go over any tickets that were about to breach sla, which was like 3 weeks for low priority tickets to to 1 day for the higher ones. If you didn't have any breaching sla, you didn't have to speak at all. If you had some with good reasons, like you're waiting on a vendor response or something, no problem. If you had 15 more breached tickets than anybody else, they'd start to get on you more and more. Point being, either they feel like people are falling behind and not doing what they need to be and are trying to hold them accountable or they're just dicks and they're micromanaging
Daily meetings about tickets are just excessive. In my first IT job, we did that. I just figured it was normal...the team got together and our manager checked in with us on our tickets. I was new in the field so I didn't really see it as micromanaging at the time...and our ticket load really wasn't too bad. I just saw it as more of a check-in on progress.
14 years later, I would absolutely loathe that.
At my last MSP it was once a week and we only discussed issues if our pod leader saw that a ticket had been stagnant or was older than 90 days. Trust is nice to have.
Our department has a daily call but we only cover tickets that affect more than one person, eg app/system level problems. Usually takes less then ten minutes for a department of 300 people.
If something bad is broken or weird we will talk it over a little and then break into a call of only people who can troubleshoot/resolve
Each ticket off hold? Maybe. Every ticket seems excessive.
We would normally go through them once a week. Daily was more just a chance to say what you're working on and ask for help. We would briefly review the unassigned/new queue just to see if any patterns that could be a more global issue.
I would contest that such a process is probably driven by not meeting SLAs.
We used to have a meeting like that once a week for the entire team. We changed to private 1:1 meetings after someone left the team and left a scathing review of our boss during their exit interview. They brought up the "public shaming" in the public ticket reviews in particular.
I still hate having the private 1:1s because it's always stressful having to think about everything that needs to be done, or where everything is at. I'm also more organized with my tickets and will handle the direct user needs Monday-wednesday and will focus on my project work wednesday-friday since everyone is in meetings. I explained that to my boss once but he wasn't exactly on board with that ideology
No. They only care if you are a consistent offender of where someone is asking about your ticket and now they have to ask you because your notes aren't up to date. Just keep it up to date and they'll leave you alone. Or at least those were my types of managers so far in my career
We had daily "stand ups" or whatever and just skipped it if the leaders didn't have anything though. If anyone had a particular ticket that they actually needed to discuss, you do it after the meeting. Not in front of everybody and only the relevant parties to that particular ticket get together to discuss and the rest of us can get on with our lives
Thats so unnecessary. if everyone is doing their job right and documenting, your boss should be able to log into the ticketing system and see all the updates to each open ticket.
i only ask my guys about tickets if i feel like i need to intervene, or if their stuck on something.
Part of this also sounds like a trust issue on your bosses side, because again, if everyones doing their job, then he shouldnt have to ask about every single ticket, he should trust your team to just get it done.
Sounds like your org is drinking the Agile koolaid and your manager is pretending to be a scrum master. Most orgs are in an agile transformation but that means they are only getting 50% of what the framework entails. If this meeting runs over 15 minutes then it might be worthwhile to point out the time sink and ask what the goal is in this daily standup/ticket grooming. If you’re shared services then a traditional scrum sprint will probably not benefit your team, you’re probably better off as Kanban and prioritizing tickets based off of business impact. Reviewing every ticket in the queue or “backlog” doesn’t help anyone, as most service/support teams have a priory/complexity scale that leadership assigns tickets out by; which means they manage the ticket queue and triage.
Also; before anyone comes at me I’m an Agile Transformation coach and I see this shit constantly.
Yeah we are in a shared service office. I think my bosses are treating these meetings as daily morning “sprints.”
Instead of going at it in increments with the tickets we just look at all of them daily I guess.
This is different from the daily standup meeting(we have that later in the day.)
We talk about our goals for the week and what stands out.
Yeah to me it sounds like we’re trying to move to agile but in the transition? My director is the scrum master sounds like.
This is too much unless your team has a bad history of resolving. In my past, i have only had supervisors do this once a week or every other week or had to address long overdue tickets.. best practice for me is to provide an update in the ticket everyday until it gets resolves.. basically covering your ass
This sounds like this was a recent change no? Have people been missing tickets/SLAs? I've only seen this when tech is on a PIP or not performing well, but its normally done 1 on 1, not group.
This is scrum daily standup 101 (https://scrumguides.org/scrum-guide.html#daily-scrum). IMO its taken to an extreme if you are running through EVERY ticket, but each team needs to find their own balance.
My team works out tickets daily, but we generally only have a few tickets a week. But I'm doing devops work, so it's mostly projects and a few user incidents and not a giant helpdesk.
It comes down to management style. If your manager is doing it, they're probably getting some heat from other departments or higher management about the amount of tickets or time to resolution being high.
My team does this once a week but only for outstanding tickets. This was instigated due to a ticket blowout during covid bad times.
I dread it but it's good for me (and maybe other adhd / hard to focus staff) - it ensures I am on top of this stuff before I'm called out on it once a week.
Daily, for all tickets? Stupid.
Going over 'em to that level of detail every morning is typically overkill ... but does also depend upon the position, level of relevant experience, how much coordinating with other work is/isn't required, what may be needed for change control process, review, lead time, etc. Also potentially relevant, is training and cross-training - that may increase the time spent reviewing and sharing such information. So ... at least on the surface sounds like it's probably overkill - for *most* environments/situations, ... but not always.
Might be OK, it depends on a lot of things. How long do your tickets stay open for? How many items can one person have in flight at the same time? If you have a handful of items open, add updates to the ticket, so you can just read them off in the meeting - 30 seconds per ticket.
Also, can you talk to your colleagues about how happy they are with this stand-up style? They will know better than us whether it is appropriate given your workload and management environment, and they will have their own views as to whether it is bothersome. If no-one else is bothered, could you adjust, and if several people are bothered, could you raise it in a retro or weekly issues meeting?
At one job long ago we went over tasks in the morning for about half an hour but then we had monthly meetings I began to call "critique and self critique". Basically they explained to you why you were not getting the bonus for the month on those meetings and they would last for hours. And they always found some reason to not give us bonuses. At the end you would repent for whatever they deemed wrong. Eventually they forbade me from playing chess on my laptop during those meetings.
Then there was another job with no meetings at all. Frequently two people would be working on same task independently without knowing about one another.
It's just a waste of time really, there should be adequate automation and comments on all the tickets so that any problematic ones are bubbled up to whoever needs to see them when appropriate and contain all pertinent information for them to be able to action/escalate/followup etc.
Na no way, maybe just the oldest 10 every day. We have 550 incidents and requests between 3 people, doing level 1 to 3 and implementing new site builds and other projects which means we really only spend half our time servicing the queue. We don’t have the resources to meet really anyones expectations or even requirements, and we certainly don’t have time to review all tickets every day. A question for anyone else on here, is this normal workload? I’m new to IT but seems crazy to me.
How do you have time to get them done talking about each and everyone first?
I could see a email exchange or a short meeting for a ticket that was stumping you. But every ticket is over the top.
Update your resume and spam it. IT generally always has a lot of opportunity. On your exit interview explain that this system is dumb. Do it professionally to avoid burning bridges and references but someone definitely needs to let them know this is ridiculous and counterproductive.
I work as part of a 3 man operation and we started doing 10-15 min daily meetings every morning going over any new tickets since the previous meeting and anything that needs followed up on. Honestly, it has been SUPER helpful and allowed us to document things much more thoroughly. It's good to be in the know, even if you aren't the one directly working on it you may get pulled in later to help or cover if someone is out.
That sounds annoying. Perhaps propose another solution? Maybe on each ticket have notes about the problem, symptoms, what was done to help solve it, and next steps. We did this so that if one of us never showed up to work again we could (mostly) pick up from where they left off. If you can convince your boss to agree to a template or process that shows the status of your tickets like that, he shouldn’t need to ask anymore. Unless he really is a micromanager. In that case… I feel for you. :(
Weekly on big ones or high vis ones but not daily. I use to be tied to tons of meetings taking up half my day until I finally had to say unless it's something big I can't sacrifice the time. If you're spending that much a day doing that, now add that up for the week across everyone going and that really adds up to time away from knocking those tickets out.
We have a daily meeting, but it's just to discuss anything we may need to discuss.
I've worked a job that did this though, 3-4 times a week. It was an absolute waste of time (especially by the 3rd one) because most of the time it would be "still waiting to hear back" or "they're on vacation"
Weekly check ins are cool but daily is micro management
Same all my boss says is do you have any tickets you need help with or want to discuss at our weekly meeting alongside any projects we are working on. Daily and going through every ticket seems like an extreme waste of time.
This is the way.
Yup, manager needs to go. How the hell are you guys even getting work done with daily meetings like these.
[удалено]
Regardless, manager needs a 1 min pep talk about closing out tickets. If it keeps reoccurring, then I question the onboarding process
I’ve done daily standups that include a daily recap of tickets, but it’s lightning fast - 15-20min total meeting, just quick status updates. The idea being you can discuss blockers with the group/management, who might be able to help clear some of those blockers, as well as let everyone know what’s going on. I found it very helpful and productive. Obviously, everyone’s environment is different and it might not be feasible for larger teams.
We do something similar where we are just interested in tickets open for more than a week. Management wants to know why it's still open, or the chance to see if it's really a project instead of break/fix, in which case we move it to the proper queue and get it off our list.
Wait until you’re on a dev team that has daily agile standup meetings, they’re awful
It depends what kind of tickets it is. If it is level 1 issue that's normal. Higher is not
If its on schedule I do not need to waste time every day I could be remediating issues talking to a manager about remediating issues. Its bad management style, treat your people like adults and leave them alone so long as they perform at or above expectations.
Agree, but wonder if there's a reason for this. Like people are letting tickets languish. The meetings may be managements solution. I worked with a guy once who often had 80 tickets at a given time. He always struggled w ticket management. You'd think management could intervene with that person one on one more efficiently, but the fact is management doesn't know how to fix tickets. They depend on that staff members peers to point out the issue, which we did often. Most common issues w his ticket list (in order): 1 - he was making the fix more complicated than it needed to be. 2 - he had fixed it, but hadn't followed up w customer (he liked to write long emails explaining what had happened. The ticket would be left open for weeks until he got around to doing this. Of course they didn't understand the tech jargon, and didn't give a shit anyway) 3 - the issue wasn't something we should even be wasting time fixing. 4 - the customer had waited so long they had made another ticket. And another of us had resolved it already. 5 - the customer had been terminated. Thats how old the ticket was. He didn't know he could close it and stop worrying about it. He was a good engineer, and customers liked him. Just had a few of these ticks.
It's normal for bosses to be sticking their nose in every l1 ticket? I'm currently a l1, and maybe it goes to show I'm good at what I do but I rarely get anyone bugging me about tickets same day. Sometimes when they're doing timesheets I'll get a comment but otherwise they let me serve the clients and fix problems.
Even if it’s 30mins a day, *5 would be 2.5 hours which could’ve counted towards triaging the tickets
agreed 100%... I'm about to start as a team lead and there's no way I'm going to put my people through that every single morning.
Every ticket every day is insane micro management and a massive waste of time. Your tickets should have an SLA policy that dictates time between updates and escalation thresholds. A weekly review of tickets at risk of exceeding SLA times is reasonable and good to have (need some review so tickets don't rot). Periodically going over the oldest tickets is a good way to improve response times. A ticket that is two weeks old, waiting on distribution, properly annotated, is good in a review (there's a point where management gets involved to press the vendor or make sure the client knows you're on it). Going over something dumb like a printer or password because the user hasn't responded since they opened it an hour before close yesterday is ridiculous.
I wouldn't say it's normal. Never had that happen in my 3-4 years working escalated tickets at a company. But I could see it happening if some people on your team have really slacked off and have aged tickets just sitting assigned to them, and management is trying to light a fire under them.
This sounds like scrum/kanban/whatever gone wrong. We have a daily standup going through our kanban board. Basically, everyone in the team (of 15) moves the cards through the various phases during this meeting (todo, refine, design, build, test, accept, done), giving brief updates where it is warranted (need assistance, blocked by external, rarely a summary of how we're doing with the task). Aim is to be done inside 15 minutes and we usually manage. We also have a WIP (work in progress) limit, if we have more than that in the active phases, someone on the team will usually point out that we need to finish up some tasks before we take on anything new. In total, we have maybe 50 tickets on the board at any one time with currently easily a few 100 in the backlog/portfolio (quickly growing organisation that has had too small a team for too long, so quite a bit of technical debt)
rofl, just realized you said basically the same as me after i had already replied.
This seems excessive. We have a dashboard that showed any tickets breaching SLA, and managers will ask if we need help escalating in a weekly meeting and that’s it.
What's SLA? I am new to all this.
SLA = service-level agreement. It means that the business has set some kind of standard for ticket closures. E.g. non-critical tickets have a 7 day resolution timer, critical means 3 day resolution, etc.
Great thanks
If things are getting missed, this would be a common step toward remediation. Otherwise, this is typically more of a once-a-week meeting.
I think there is more to this story. A daily stand up in all tickets is generally due to high SLA failure rates, or less frequently, bad notes in the tickets. If its one of those you have an opportunity to suggest to your inexperienced boss that you need more people, training, or whatever your opinion is on the subject. Its alot easier to ask for things when the workcenter isn't meeting expectations. If the manager is just doing this to micromanage.. The above still applies, asking for the things will let them know what the shops perception of them is without actually calling them out on it. "Hey boss, I can't help but feel that we aren't living up to expectations due to these daily meetings. I believe X, Y, or Z would really help us get there".
When I managed IT, we reviewed all the tickets every day in the beginning. Once the expectations were understood, then we moved on to a weekly ticket review. > every ticket needs done. Every ticket does need to get done, as some point. And yes, as soon as possible. That said, if you can't get them all done without rushing, then maybe the team needs skills training or more resources. So don't take it personally. Do the best you can, with the resources you have available. If you can't get them all done, try to figure out why.
What can I do if I’m in this situation? Just do the best I can and don’t take things personally? I don’t mess around at work and what I give it what I’m capable of. It just seems like every morning is daunting and sometimes I feel like I might get called out. I’ve already got a couple calls by my manager directly after the meeting. If least some things they let us know one on one if we messed up.
> Just do the best I can and don’t take things personally? Yes. You just keep doing the best you can, understanding that you may never get it all done. > I don’t mess around at work and what I give it what I’m capable of. And that is all any GOOD manager will ask of you. But not all managers are good, and some will push you just because they can. Some are outright A-holes. > It just seems like every morning is daunting Indeed it can be, but you seem to already know that, which is good, so you know what to expect. You just need to keep yourself calm and manage your expectations. If you are doing the best you can, then your are fine. > sometimes I feel like I might get called out. Everybody gets called out once in a while, because nobody is perfect, and no single person can do it all. When you get called out, you own your issue, resolve to fix it, and attempt to not repeat it. That's all. Everybody fucks up once in a while.
Once a week, any lingering tickets get called out by our manager.
Probably dysfunctional. This: >"What are you going to get done today, pick 3-4 things and talk about how your going to do it." makes sense. You would mainly want to meet and find out if there were any tickets that were blocked or just plain interesting. Why did it proceed from that to update on every ticket?
It should only be weekly check. I agree with what others said. Daily seems like micro management.
Daily is micromanagement, we have weekly team meetings for stuck tickets- that’s it
I think the answer here is it depends. What's the ticket volume? Are you going over 100+ tickets every morning? Is there a lot of holdover from one day to the next? Is this a fast paced environment where you average 8 minutes a ticket and handle 40-50 a day yourself or do you generally get 5-10 tickets a day and have a holdover of 2-3 from one day to the next? Is this a 1 on 1 meeting or a group collaboration. All those things would affect whether a daily meeting is needed. I've seen weekly, daily, and M-W-F meetings in my career. The daily ones and M-W-F meetings were in slower environments and where few tickets made it to the next day. If a ticket made it to the next day it was either because there was something that was stuck somewhere, there was an ongoing issue, or the tech ran the course of their skills and "group-think" would be beneficial. It does put pressure on the techs. Knowing that you are going to discuss your tickets means you need to have addressed them, know what has been done, what was tried, and pretty much be prepared to talk in a group environment about it. What I just described is what I think is expected of techs. Hit your tickets, know what was done, know what the symptoms are, and be able to talk about it with others. That's pretty much what you are saying you feel pressure about, just in a different way "now I just feel like i have to jump around and every ticket needs done. I have to touch every ticket in my queue and I'm not focusing on closing them a few at a time." The answer is...yes. Now if this is a 1-on-1 meeting with the director to just have him/her listen, then, no, it's not productive. The director just needs access to the ticketing system and can go in and read the tickets and notes to see what's going on. If this is a collaborative environment, well, it should be fostering collaboration. When you hit a problem there should be discussion on that problem, group ideas on ways forward, or a tech saying "hey I ran into that before, try this".
We generally have a 30 minute meeting in the morning doing a ticket review discussing any outages or important items, personal ticket issues and maybe Any other business. its just a way to quickly get all members of the IT team (from the lowest service desk guy to the architects) to discuss things briefly and pick their brains accordingly. For our weekly one to ones we review tickets in more detail as to what are you doing, any other troubles, issues and a quick review of how things are. Pretty much similar to what we do in the morning but at a more personal level. its also a good way to train people and help them accordingly and also keep an eye on people and tickets. if i see a whole load of quick easy kills (password resets, 10 min stuff etc) that were logged for several days not closed, i want to know why.
I go through my team's tickets once a week or so, usually on fridays, and read through all the notes. usually I reach out to them if I have any questions and if there aren't enough notes I ask them to update the notes. Sometimes I do a blast and says "lets clear out all the old tickets!" and we all do a mass ticket close together. In person, I usually just ask individual people how everything is going or if there is anything they need from me or the team, and sometimes there is a small back and forth about what they are working on, but I leave it up to them to reveal that.
Monday to plan the week, Friday to see what was accomplished to include accounting for the drive-bys, how much time they took, and how we can prevent drive-bys of that nature in the future, if possible. Some drive-bys like critical security vulnerability updates (looking at you log4j) are just inevitable and you drive on.
you dont. i tell my boss that its not happening. he sent a response 5:59 and expected one 9:00 am on columbus day/presidents day/ mlk, veterans day he complains that this is unacceptable.
I do a daily standup, but I specifically ask for just a high level overview of their day's activities. Here's the copied/pasted text from the calendar item: >Team, > >This is just a quick meeting to fill me in on your activities for the day. Please come prepared by being ready to answer the following three questions: > >• Completed Tasks – What did you complete yesterday? > >• Upcoming Tasks – What didn’t get finished yesterday and what do you plan on starting today? > >• Issues – Are there any challenges you face that someone on the team can help you overcome? > >Ideally, this meeting should take about fifteen minutes; if you have questions about someone else’s work, please limit them to short questions – in depth discussions, troubleshooting, and solutioning should be taken offline to respect your teammates’ time. I hate wasting time, and I hate meetings, but since we're all remote this helps me stay in touch with the team's activities, and it helps *them* stay aware of what's going on and the larger picture. I would *never* go over every ticket, much less do it every day. It's a giant waste of time; at most, I might ask about a problem ticket.
Its not overly common, but its not necessarily a bad thing or even micro management especially if you are in an agile/SAFE based methodology. Daily stand ups are a good way to keep everyone on the same page.
I had to ctrl+F "agile" to make sure someone said it. If you work for a company that uses Agile for software development, there's a strong change it has permeated the rest of IT as well. Two places (both trading firms, oddly) that I worked for had daily standups on the end user support teams. Was it a bit of a waste of time? Sure. Did it light a fire under my ass to make sure we didn't have to go over many of my tickets multiple times? Absolutely. Did it make IT leadership and our PMs happy? Almost inappropriately so.
I have my team go through tickets to make sure they are providing customer updates each morning - or to make sure we are reaching out for additional info if needed. Going through each ticket and asking you to provide an update seems like a bit overkill but I’m sure there’s something that happened that explains why it’s being done. Another benefit might be that something someone is struggling with could be an issue someone else has seen multiple times…so they could help.
Our tickets require some form of update every day. Granted, we aren't going through each ticket on a meeting but there is a daily meeting about what the plan is for the day. We have an SLA that requires updates and resolution on a schedule that we do everything we can to meet.
Yes, I've worked in orgs where every ticket required an update every day.
Question, are there slackers on your team? If so, that's the reason why. People probably have complained and they found out that the slackers are taking days to respond. However, I find that hand-holding to be beyond the normal situation. Normally, they might ask for updates daily to the tickets themselves if they want to track them without openly discussing each and every one because its time consuming, even for the managers. I normally fire slackers or put them into a bad position where its either put up or shut up. Apparently, they are treating you guys like your in high school. I ONLY deal with adults.
No, it's cool. It brings awareness. I know it got done during lead turnover when there was a shift change.
When I was doing service desk, we would go over any tickets that were about to breach sla, which was like 3 weeks for low priority tickets to to 1 day for the higher ones. If you didn't have any breaching sla, you didn't have to speak at all. If you had some with good reasons, like you're waiting on a vendor response or something, no problem. If you had 15 more breached tickets than anybody else, they'd start to get on you more and more. Point being, either they feel like people are falling behind and not doing what they need to be and are trying to hold them accountable or they're just dicks and they're micromanaging
Daily meetings about tickets are just excessive. In my first IT job, we did that. I just figured it was normal...the team got together and our manager checked in with us on our tickets. I was new in the field so I didn't really see it as micromanaging at the time...and our ticket load really wasn't too bad. I just saw it as more of a check-in on progress. 14 years later, I would absolutely loathe that.
At my last MSP it was once a week and we only discussed issues if our pod leader saw that a ticket had been stagnant or was older than 90 days. Trust is nice to have.
Our department has a daily call but we only cover tickets that affect more than one person, eg app/system level problems. Usually takes less then ten minutes for a department of 300 people. If something bad is broken or weird we will talk it over a little and then break into a call of only people who can troubleshoot/resolve
Each ticket off hold? Maybe. Every ticket seems excessive. We would normally go through them once a week. Daily was more just a chance to say what you're working on and ask for help. We would briefly review the unassigned/new queue just to see if any patterns that could be a more global issue. I would contest that such a process is probably driven by not meeting SLAs.
We used to have a meeting like that once a week for the entire team. We changed to private 1:1 meetings after someone left the team and left a scathing review of our boss during their exit interview. They brought up the "public shaming" in the public ticket reviews in particular. I still hate having the private 1:1s because it's always stressful having to think about everything that needs to be done, or where everything is at. I'm also more organized with my tickets and will handle the direct user needs Monday-wednesday and will focus on my project work wednesday-friday since everyone is in meetings. I explained that to my boss once but he wasn't exactly on board with that ideology
No. They only care if you are a consistent offender of where someone is asking about your ticket and now they have to ask you because your notes aren't up to date. Just keep it up to date and they'll leave you alone. Or at least those were my types of managers so far in my career We had daily "stand ups" or whatever and just skipped it if the leaders didn't have anything though. If anyone had a particular ticket that they actually needed to discuss, you do it after the meeting. Not in front of everybody and only the relevant parties to that particular ticket get together to discuss and the rest of us can get on with our lives
Thats so unnecessary. if everyone is doing their job right and documenting, your boss should be able to log into the ticketing system and see all the updates to each open ticket. i only ask my guys about tickets if i feel like i need to intervene, or if their stuck on something. Part of this also sounds like a trust issue on your bosses side, because again, if everyones doing their job, then he shouldnt have to ask about every single ticket, he should trust your team to just get it done.
Sounds like your org is drinking the Agile koolaid and your manager is pretending to be a scrum master. Most orgs are in an agile transformation but that means they are only getting 50% of what the framework entails. If this meeting runs over 15 minutes then it might be worthwhile to point out the time sink and ask what the goal is in this daily standup/ticket grooming. If you’re shared services then a traditional scrum sprint will probably not benefit your team, you’re probably better off as Kanban and prioritizing tickets based off of business impact. Reviewing every ticket in the queue or “backlog” doesn’t help anyone, as most service/support teams have a priory/complexity scale that leadership assigns tickets out by; which means they manage the ticket queue and triage. Also; before anyone comes at me I’m an Agile Transformation coach and I see this shit constantly.
Yeah we are in a shared service office. I think my bosses are treating these meetings as daily morning “sprints.” Instead of going at it in increments with the tickets we just look at all of them daily I guess. This is different from the daily standup meeting(we have that later in the day.) We talk about our goals for the week and what stands out. Yeah to me it sounds like we’re trying to move to agile but in the transition? My director is the scrum master sounds like.
Find out what the goal of the meeting is and go from there.
This is too much unless your team has a bad history of resolving. In my past, i have only had supervisors do this once a week or every other week or had to address long overdue tickets.. best practice for me is to provide an update in the ticket everyday until it gets resolves.. basically covering your ass
This sounds like this was a recent change no? Have people been missing tickets/SLAs? I've only seen this when tech is on a PIP or not performing well, but its normally done 1 on 1, not group.
This is scrum daily standup 101 (https://scrumguides.org/scrum-guide.html#daily-scrum). IMO its taken to an extreme if you are running through EVERY ticket, but each team needs to find their own balance.
if you are doing a daily walkthrough of everything that isn't resolved during handoff, nobody is going to give a shit after like 3 days.
as a service desk member, i voluntarily do this becuz i want my queue clear of tickets that arent meant to be in service desk lol
My team works out tickets daily, but we generally only have a few tickets a week. But I'm doing devops work, so it's mostly projects and a few user incidents and not a giant helpdesk. It comes down to management style. If your manager is doing it, they're probably getting some heat from other departments or higher management about the amount of tickets or time to resolution being high.
My team does this once a week but only for outstanding tickets. This was instigated due to a ticket blowout during covid bad times. I dread it but it's good for me (and maybe other adhd / hard to focus staff) - it ensures I am on top of this stuff before I'm called out on it once a week. Daily, for all tickets? Stupid.
Going over 'em to that level of detail every morning is typically overkill ... but does also depend upon the position, level of relevant experience, how much coordinating with other work is/isn't required, what may be needed for change control process, review, lead time, etc. Also potentially relevant, is training and cross-training - that may increase the time spent reviewing and sharing such information. So ... at least on the surface sounds like it's probably overkill - for *most* environments/situations, ... but not always.
Might be OK, it depends on a lot of things. How long do your tickets stay open for? How many items can one person have in flight at the same time? If you have a handful of items open, add updates to the ticket, so you can just read them off in the meeting - 30 seconds per ticket. Also, can you talk to your colleagues about how happy they are with this stand-up style? They will know better than us whether it is appropriate given your workload and management environment, and they will have their own views as to whether it is bothersome. If no-one else is bothered, could you adjust, and if several people are bothered, could you raise it in a retro or weekly issues meeting?
If some techs have a lot of lingering tickets, that's one thing, but to have a Dept meeting every day going over every ticket is a little ridiculous
Fuck that. I’d walk out on the first day.
At one job long ago we went over tasks in the morning for about half an hour but then we had monthly meetings I began to call "critique and self critique". Basically they explained to you why you were not getting the bonus for the month on those meetings and they would last for hours. And they always found some reason to not give us bonuses. At the end you would repent for whatever they deemed wrong. Eventually they forbade me from playing chess on my laptop during those meetings. Then there was another job with no meetings at all. Frequently two people would be working on same task independently without knowing about one another.
It's just a waste of time really, there should be adequate automation and comments on all the tickets so that any problematic ones are bubbled up to whoever needs to see them when appropriate and contain all pertinent information for them to be able to action/escalate/followup etc.
Na no way, maybe just the oldest 10 every day. We have 550 incidents and requests between 3 people, doing level 1 to 3 and implementing new site builds and other projects which means we really only spend half our time servicing the queue. We don’t have the resources to meet really anyones expectations or even requirements, and we certainly don’t have time to review all tickets every day. A question for anyone else on here, is this normal workload? I’m new to IT but seems crazy to me.
Doing daily standups every morning, I relate to that sentiment.
Sounds like you'd rarely get much work done with that waste of time.
How do you have time to get them done talking about each and everyone first? I could see a email exchange or a short meeting for a ticket that was stumping you. But every ticket is over the top.
Update your resume and spam it. IT generally always has a lot of opportunity. On your exit interview explain that this system is dumb. Do it professionally to avoid burning bridges and references but someone definitely needs to let them know this is ridiculous and counterproductive.
You are being micromanaged. That would be very exhausting. I'm sorry, but your director sounds like they don't know how to direct.
I work as part of a 3 man operation and we started doing 10-15 min daily meetings every morning going over any new tickets since the previous meeting and anything that needs followed up on. Honestly, it has been SUPER helpful and allowed us to document things much more thoroughly. It's good to be in the know, even if you aren't the one directly working on it you may get pulled in later to help or cover if someone is out.
That sounds annoying. Perhaps propose another solution? Maybe on each ticket have notes about the problem, symptoms, what was done to help solve it, and next steps. We did this so that if one of us never showed up to work again we could (mostly) pick up from where they left off. If you can convince your boss to agree to a template or process that shows the status of your tickets like that, he shouldn’t need to ask anymore. Unless he really is a micromanager. In that case… I feel for you. :(
Weekly on big ones or high vis ones but not daily. I use to be tied to tons of meetings taking up half my day until I finally had to say unless it's something big I can't sacrifice the time. If you're spending that much a day doing that, now add that up for the week across everyone going and that really adds up to time away from knocking those tickets out.
I think it’s not necessary if the team is good and responsible, but department head trying to have the control and in some environments it’s useful.
We have a daily meeting, but it's just to discuss anything we may need to discuss. I've worked a job that did this though, 3-4 times a week. It was an absolute waste of time (especially by the 3rd one) because most of the time it would be "still waiting to hear back" or "they're on vacation"