Ticket Challenges

Ticket driven workflows provide challenges for both Application and Platform teams:

• Slow turnaround. Each request requires human intervention, regardless of the difficulty of the task. The interfaces provided by tickets can lead to multiple questions and interactions before any action is complete.

• Error prone. Requests come in from application teams with incorrect details that the ticketing system makes difficult to validate. Engineers fulfilling requests are doing so manually, and feedback loops to verify are slow. 

• Lots of manual toil. The ticket interface disguises patterns of work that could be automated, and many ticketing tools make automation difficult. Platform teams operate within the ticketing tool and rarely have bandwidth to think strategically about how they complete incoming requests.

• Shadow IT and poor adoption of the platform. The goal of fast delivery to customers isn’t supported by a platform where manual toil takes time and often includes mistakes. Application teams find ways to circumvent the platform to create and manage their own public cloud and SaaS accounts.

• Inconsistent usage. Often users of the platform don’t have access to the ticketing system, or will access it through a third-system. People may circumvent the system entirely, asking platform engineers directly for services (either via email, or messaging apps). In turn, this makes it hard for platform teams to track and prioritise their work properly.

Tickets take time and involve manual work.