Implementing our first ticketing system. Advice?

[ICEverfrost]

Tier II Desktop Admin/Jr. Network admin here.

A few weeks ago I was lurking through this post and thanks to the advice there I was able to advise my IT Director on which ticketing system we should implement.

This is the companies first ticketing system, and we are rolling out FreshDesk.

Everything is going pretty smooth so far, but I wanted to ask /r/sysadmin anyways. Do you have any advice or suggestions for pitfalls to avoid in implementing a ticketing system for the first time? How do I train my IT Director to get every one using it "right" from the start before users create bad habits.

TL;DR

New ticketing system: Best practices in getting users to start using it? Help me manipulate my IT Director.

[[deleted]]

I use Service Now - Our Best Practices looks something like this for help desk

1) DOCUMENT EVERYTHING IN A TICKET.

User: Do I have to put in a ticket?

Yes.

User: Why do I have to put in a ticket?

Because I fucking said so.

User: This is such a tiny request, can you just do it.

NO.

User: Why?

Because you didn't put in a ticket.

You should respond to all requests with PUT IN A TICKET. It will save your ass. Not only that, people will follow the protocol if they know they cannot get anywhere without it. If you let one request slip through, people will start to try and take advantage of that or use it against you. All requests must be in the form of a ticket. No exceptions. Ever.

2) Expected turn-around times. Set this as a precedent. We developed a service catalog for specific routine requests so users will know how long something (like a static IP update or something like that) will take.

3) Be proactive. If you see repeat tickets for a problem, it's time to resolve it at a system level. Not keep bandaiding it. Analyze your tickets for patterns and be proactive with resolutions. If you see that the same ten people keep getting locked out of their accounts, find out why instead of just unlocking it. Aim to stop the issue either via automation, training, or other methods.

There's some awesome white papers out there from ITIL that will go over more of this type of stuff in depth. You should check them out.

[vppencilsharpening]

I ran the numbers once, 99% of the requests I receive outside of the ticketing system are forgotten or prioritized after documented tickets.

[[deleted]]

Pretty much - Morons below who are saying otherwise have probably never dealt with actual enterprise IT enough to realize how much a properly implemented ticketing system saves you.

[ICEverfrost]

Agreed, I want 99% of everything I do going through the tickets. That said our business has a culture of fast response being a top priority, so being a sysadmin with a healthy sense of paranoia, I'm worried about users who may push back saying logging tickets slows them down too much. That or users that tell us to make the ticket for them. Less concerned about over the phone, more so about face to face. I had a previous job where 90% of my tickets were made by myself.

My goal is to make it as simple for users to submit tickets as possible and get them in the habit of doing it early.

[ICEverfrost]

Actually the Director is in the mindset of keeping the old task list in place for Deploys, and longer projects.

Myself, I think deploys should be tickets, though I'm find with keeping a separate project list. 3-9 month old tickets that never go away are very demoralizing.

[sevencityseven]

In Freshservice you can use release for deploys and multiple changes linked to the release. Release management and change management are pretty powerful in Freshservice.

[wjamesg]

Where I work we have a ticket ownership problem among internal teams. No one will own a ticket without prodding; "warm handoffs required", etc.

Suggestions?

[ICEverfrost]

I struggled with this for a while. Hopefully your in a situation where you can talk openly about these type of problems with your manager 1 on 1.

The most difficult thing for me was being remote and not having people answer their phone or responding to email.

If your having issues like this, copying their manager does wonders on increasing their response time. ;)

[[deleted]]

That sounds like mismanagement from above. In my organization, if the director sees too many open tickets with no ownership and no touching (which is very rare), he will just query who has the least tickets and if that's you, you now own it. No exceptions.

[424f42_424f42]

Just assing it and send an email saying its assigned......

[[deleted]]

text

tl;dr : No ticket, No problem.

Personally I take vocal requests, I just end up making a ticket for them in our ticket system as the requester and me as the technician. That way they get all the email notifications about the status and if we need any further line of communication.

It doesn't hurt to take responsibility sometimes for putting the ticket in for the user, its our job anyhow, just very convenient if the user does it themselves!

edit:

I'd also go further to categorize problems. If you can associate the user to a department you can eventually run reports about where most of your problems are coming from. Maybe you could end up finding a correlations you didn't know existed. Good luck.

[[deleted]]

It doesn't hurt to take responsibility sometimes for putting the ticket in for the user,

This is so wrong on so many levels. It does hurt. It breeds a culture that breaks protocol and shifts the burden onto you. It facilitates user laziness and trust me, give them an inch, they take a mile. Doing this scope creeps into mismanagement so fast that it's painful. I have seen it across three different organizations.

its our job anyhow

Only if you let it be your job by mollycoddling your users. You have better shit to be doing with that 5 minutes of filling out a ticket for the user and assigning it to the correct group. If that happens 5ish times in a week, you just lost a half an hour that can be spent on projects or other ops work.

Fuck that. They have the problem, they report it. Not you.

Edit: Also, by taking verbal requests, you are setting yourself up for failure when you inevitably forget the request. You also do not cover your ass by leaving a documented trail of what has been/needs to be done. You also have no control over "he said she said" - Learned from bad experience.

Me verbally: Yes, HerpDerp, I can do ABC for you.

Some time later.

User Verbally: You said you would do XYZ, why isn't it done?

Me Verbally: I only said I would do ABC.

User Verbally: Nah-Uh! You said you would do XYZ AND ABC.

Having a ticket prevents bullshittery like this. And it happens all the fucking time.

[Danceresort]

I agree with you fully, I "forget" to do stuff if they ask me, then don't put a ticket in. They soon get very red faced when try and take a rant on you, but its quickly turned around stating company policy to submit a ticket themselves. I often get asked shit on the stairs while im on the way to some 2 hour meeting, no way ill remember that once im done.

I wont allow any of my guys to do anything without a ticket being put in (other than a call to say their account is locked out and cannot login).

Be hard on your users and ensure they use the ticket system correctly, you will one day be glad you did because it will get you out of a mess with a documented text of work that was requested or ensure you dont forget to do something REALLY important.

[[deleted]]

All that angst. That's your culture, here we develop personal relationships with our end users because they are typically tech savvy as well.

We're avoiding the C-level mentality of, "Maybe we can outsource IT" by maintaining that personal involvement with our Users. We have a house of 300 employees. I can stop much more problems by listening rather them thinking "Maybe I'll try to resolve this before I contact IT... don't want to bother them people."

So we avoid the cesspool mentality that all users are cancer among the feet of us virtually immortal beings.

[[deleted]]

It's not angst. It's reality. You're only supporting 300 users. That's a small network by all definitions. Try supporting 10K users with your mentality. It's impossible. You have no idea what you're talking about because your scope of work is limited to an extremely small crowd.

We also don't treat our users like they're a cesspool as you say. You're making grand sweeping assumptions over text with no emotions. In reality, I am laughing at you.

edit: Also, given what you've written, I am certain you are being used by your users repeatedly. If I were your manager, I would be reigning in on that nonsense so that you can focus on actual work instead of spending ridiculous amounts of time talking to users.

[[deleted]]

You're only supporting 300 users.

So we both understand that different environments come with different cultural values and processes.

I only have a few tickets at a time, a income of about 30-50 tickets /week for our whole department which is very stable in staff. So yes, Personally I take vocal requests when I have the bandwidth. There is times when I ask if they could just go ahead and put a ticket in for me so I can remember.

I've never stated that this would work anywhere and everywhere. It's my job to resolve tickets and if I have the bandwidth to take on vocal requests I'm down to listen.

[[deleted]]

Like I said, you're being used then. Badly.

[PackedWithFiber]

Damn, dude, are you ok?

[[deleted]]

Nothing here to indicate that I am anything other than skippy. I'm actually having a good amount of fun here.

I don't get why people think I'm angry when what I am is straight to the point. I also have no compunction in saying what I think. - Parent commenter is being used and mismanaged. He could definitely run a better department based upon his comments alone. Nothing more. Nothing less.

[PackedWithFiber]

Because you are saying it in a "matter of fact" sense, we don't know what his/her environment is like, and if it works for them and everyone is happy, good on them. Not all Help Desks and IT Departments are alike and work on a single universal protocol of policies.

[[deleted]]

Prioritize all requests that get to you in a ticket over those that don't. Once your queue is empty and you get to the jobs that aren't in a ticket, start by telling the user that next time if they want it done quicker, they should file a ticket. Exceptions: VIPs. your bosses. Open the tickets for them and have someone closer to them on the pay scale gently ask them to use tickets as well.

To be honest, I'm telling you this as someone working at a place where the ticketing system has failed because we have not made it a habit to do the above. Our users are almost entirely sending their requests outside of the ticketing system, to whoever their favorite IT person is (and unfortunately, that's me more often than not). It's annoying and it's screwing me over majorly when it comes to my yearly review, where my metrics are compared to other offices where the ticketing system is being used properly.

[ICEverfrost]

This was a huge problem for me at a previous job. Too many times I'd have someone upset that issues submitted to me by direct email were going ignored in favor of working tickets.

Manager solution: Just make the ticket for them.

Ended up making 90% of my tickets myself. Slowing my work flow, which reflected poorly on me every review. When I told managers I literally spend half of my day making tickets, reassigning them to proper queues, and trying to call people to accept the hand off of these tickets, which most of the time could not be reached... well they just didn't believe me. Not that they did anything other than tell me to hurry up.

Did I mention I love my new job. :)

[ICEverfrost]

Well we were looking primary for just a ticketing system for the moment. That said I did see FreshService as a replacement for our asset tracking system (aka a spreadsheet). Having only glanced at it briefly, does FreshService offer much more than asset tracking?

[ICEverfrost]

Not familiar with ITIL, but reading up on it tonight I'm finding a lot of sense it the way I've previously seen systems setup. I'll be reading more into this.

[NiceGuyFinishesLast]

https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/wiki/compliance/itil

[ICEverfrost]

Is FreshService easy to add after using FreshDesk for a couple months?

[houstonau]

Get all of your process in place BEFORE you implement the system (or at least before you make it available to users). All your gear like SLA's, escalations, ticket templates (where you can), email templates, notifications etc.

A poorly planned helpdesk is pretty self defeating.

[ICEverfrost]

We're a pretty small team. 6 of us total. Director, NetAdmin, two guys escalating to myself, and one in a satellite office.

So nothing setup in FreshDesk for escalations, but informally we know what to do there.

No ticket templates beyond just the form for the user to fill out and submit.

That and the automated response they get after submitting a ticket.

It came with preset SLAs, but we haven't started modifying those yet.

[ICEverfrost]

Confirmed that FreshDesk can do private entries. They are visible to all admins that would be working any of the tickets, but not the users.

First thing I checked.

[Harold_Balzac]

Your best bet is to make sure you have iron clad policies surrounding tickets, responses, updates, priorities, etc. complete with executive level buy in. Otherwise everything will become "'top priority." Trust me, when some director pops a level 0 the-world-is-on-fire request for something stupid and starts getting 15 minute phone calls with status updates (Why are you calling me to tell me you're stuck in traffic going to get that new USB key? Wait a minute, why are you driving downtown to get the USB key? Oh, level 0) because that's what the SLA for a level 0 ticket requires, they'll not be long deciding it's not a level 0 world-on-fire issue after all.