Engineering IT claims its 10,000th ticket
9/18/2014
It took about eight months to decide on a ticket system and six months to implement one, but it only took a couple of months for Engineering IT to respond to its 10,000th ticket.
Tickets are submitted requests to Engineering IT, and they are tracked through the Request Tracker (RT) ticket system. RT keeps track of tickets sent to the various Engineering IT departments, coordinating tasks and managing requests among a community of users at the University of Illinois.
Kathleen Booth, IT Specialist for the College of Engineering at Illinois, nabbed the 10,000th ticket, which Dave Mussulman, Senior IT Specialist, had placed a bounty on. Booth was surprised by how quickly Engineering IT reached 10,000 tickets, linking the large volume to the quantity of issues the department handles and a successful migration into the new ticket system.
“I actually received a page from Danny (Tang, IT Specialist) saying ‘I just noticed that the 10,000th ticket belongs to you, congrats!’ which was a surprise to me,” Booth said.
She may have only received a free lunch, but as project manager for the creation of the ticket system, Booth seems wholly satisfied with the ticket system’s success.
The ticket system’s origination stemmed from an inefficient and varied environment that involved multiple ticket systems, along with various mail groups and resource mailboxes.
“It was unwieldy and most departments followed a department-specific workflow that often had little to do with how another department worked,” Booth said. “This was a penalty to providing consistent levels of service and easily being able to back each other up, and anything that crossed divisions risked delays due to lack of consistent communication paths.”
Upon assuming the role of project manager, Booth said her committee was tasked with developing a workflow design to handle requests, with the assumption that it would be applied to the pre-existing ticket system. But after the upgrade proved to be unusable, the committee decided to develop something new.
The workflow design took most of the committee’s time. This is where it was decided how various divisions would interact and how issues that involved multiple Engineering IT staffers would be handled. They also established the workflow’s path, starting with a ticket’s entry point through one of the various departments to the resolution of the problem. This design led to the requirements for a ticket system, and eventually resulted in RT.
Mussulman said there was some hesitancy among Engineering IT staff members upon the system’s implementation, but the department as a whole has settled into the RT ticket system. The 10,000th ticket bounty created a healthy competition among staffers, and Mussulman hopes the allure of the 20,000th ticket will do the same.
“We’re just scared that (the 20,000th ticket) will be spam,” he said.
Along with improving inter-divisional interactions, Booth said the RT ticket system helps the department to recognize when an issue is very widespread, allowing the problem to be filtered through Engineering IT’s various levels and solve the problem.
Booth is proud of the ticket system she helped create, noting how it’s done as much for the Engineering IT department as it has for its customers.
“I think it has had a unifying effect and improved our service,” she said.