Experience

Ticket data

Ticket data is a good record of the work that fits neatly into a ticket. A lot of what keeps a service running doesn't.

Insights and thoughts Andrew Wood

Ticket data is a good record of the work that fits neatly into a ticket.

SLA performance, queue times and assignment counts show up clearly in a board report. A huge amount of what keeps a service running doesn’t. Chasing a third-party vendor escalation that has stalled for three days. Working out who actually owns a complex fault that sits across networking, cloud and a third-party software vendor. The ten-minute coaching conversation on a morning stand-up that stops a junior engineer making a mistake. Absorbing an awkward commercial question from an account manager so an engineer can stay focused on fixing a customer’s outage.

In engineering leadership, that often gets called glue work. None of it has a ticket number, it rarely shows up on a utilisation spreadsheet, and a fair amount of it is the only reason the ticket numbers look good in the first place.

If you’re assessing a delivery function, start with the data by all means, but don’t stop there. Ask the team what they spend time on that never gets logged. The answer usually explains the gap between what the dashboard says and how the service actually feels to customers.