prioritization

[hisamishness.livejournal.com]

I quote:

There is a new Critical ticket in the %mycompanyarea% queue.

%tiknum%username%miscgarb

No Room Assigned

BB Holster

Quote request - holster for a new BlackBerry Curve 8300.

Note - it's a CRITICAL ISSUE that this person gets a holster for a new blackberry. Yeah, %user is a high-up muckety-muckl, but get real. If a BB holster is OMGWTFBBQ CRITICAL, just how the hell are they going to classify %user's email failing or the machine falling in the hot-tub or ....????

Sometimes I think people's brains shut down when confronted with a super-senior bigwig.

Comments

[snarl817.livejournal.com]

This is exactly why we have criteria for ticket severity. The last time someone opened a sev 3 ticket, they got yelled at by management because the server wasn't actually down.

[the-s-guy.livejournal.com]

At a previous job, we had the same problem when the executives started screwing with our triage system and making certain things have mandatory urgency levels.

Thus, a meteor strike/nuclear accident which took out both our main government mainframe and the backup, resulting in literally over a million voters not getting their fortnightly dole/pension/kumquat payout, would have PRECISELY the same urgency as the CEO wanting to change the color of her Windows desktop.

A different employer of mine had a sneakier approach. Each ticket had both an urgency rating and a triage rating. The former was allowed to be set by the caller or we could offer to 'increase the urgency' to get self-important gits off our phones. The latter was purely technically based and was the actual order the tickets were addressed in.

Basically, the former was how important the caller felt their issue was, and the latter the opinion of the team responsible for the repair. No-one outside IT ever twigged that there could possibly be more than one 'rating' for a ticket.

[gilmoure.livejournal.com]

Yup, we've resulted to this as well. We always note if customer request "OMGWTFBBQ!!!" (**golf clap** on that one) as well as assign it real world importance.

[lihan161051.livejournal.com]

And that's the problem with user-assigned ticket priority .. there will always be people who think any issue *they* have is super-emergency-crash-critical because it affects *them*. For whatever reason, delusions of entitlement usually but sometimes it's a plain old inability to understand that they're abusing the priority system to grab an unfair share of limited resources, some people just think it's their right to automatically make every ticket Critical because they want faster service and they don't care what impact it has on others. And it's even worse when you get two prima donnas trying to out-VIP each other with you in the middle .. if there were a priority above Critical, they'd go straight to that. It's just the nature of that particular beast ..

[hisamishness.livejournal.com]

Worse - it's our systems that assign this initial priority based on VIPness ranking, nomatter what the issue or user reported severity.

[fuzzyr.livejournal.com]

True enough. However, one thing that bothers me from the other end of the phone is when I've gone to the trouble to diagnose the problem (server is down), and I have 3 entire aisles of people who all see the same problem when it was working minutes ago, and the network is not the problem (other machines on the same subnet are up and running, but the help desk categorizes it as Sev 3, and then I get a call back 2 days later asking if the problem is resolved.

[hikari-neko.livejournal.com]

Kind of makes you wish you could reject tickets for being incorrectly tagged, doesn't it?

[soruk.livejournal.com]

Anonymously.

[thudthwacker.livejournal.com]

You should interoffice him a denim pocket, a spool of thread, and a needle.

Or just e-mail him a link to this (http://www.sewnews.com/library/sewnews/library/aatips5.htm) helpful article.

Re: Anonymously.

[gilmoure.livejournal.com]

thudthwacker FTW!!!

[sethb.livejournal.com]

Last time I had to worry about that sort of stuff, there were three priorities.

1. Firm capital at risk.

2. Missing opportunities to make money.

3. Everything else.

It's amazing (not really) how many problems go away when the user has to answer "How much money will that make for the firm?"

[gilmoure.livejournal.com]

I would love to be able to ask; Is anything on fire. Has emergency response shown up? for critical requests.

[jecook]

Our priority system at work is thus:

1. total systems outage for any one of about 5 or six critical systems that keep revenue flowing inward.

2. partial system outage for said systems, total system failure for non-critical systems (not may of those, really.)

3. Standard priority.

4. low priority/idle time tasks

5. scheduled tasks/time sensitive tasks (i.e., it must be done at this time)

Now, our time to resolution is a little whacked. For sev 1 and 2, the resolve time is something like 4 hours. Sev 3 is 24 hours, and 4 is two weeks.

WHile I know that one of our vendors can be fantastically good at getting out to fix stuff (like our ancient mini that shat it's power supply one fine morning; they had a power supply in stock and in town for that dinosaur!), I'm not sure about one of our other venduhs. Fortunately, we have a huge amount of redundancy built into most of our systems.

[kyidyl.livejournal.com]

I feel your pain...our ticketing system also automatically marks any exec's ticket critical. And anyone director and higher gets an exec flag.

However, outside of that, the only things that get mark critical (which means that we have a required half hour turnaround on them) are multi-user issues (IE: 20 people here can't get online.) and anything else our command center deems critical. Which, isn't much. I think I saw them do it once for something that the user wasn't exec, but it was mission-critical for one of our gov't contracts.

But our t1's do have this annoying habit of writing "urgent" in the title of any tickets where the customer meeps loud enough. As if "urgent" makes us answer it out of order.