How long is it acceptable to keep an incident ticket open? If the aim of incident management is to restore disrupted service as soon as possible, we might reasonably expect most incidents to be fixed within a day or two. However, there are always a few incidents that resist resolution but generally those incidents should be addressed with a workaround and a problem ticket. Some incident tickets however are not for incidents at all, but rather are for things such as requests for services that can easily be provided or requests for features that should more properly be processed in projects. And of course some tickets just get forgotten, even to the point where the user has left the University. So given all that, we think that there should be very few incident tickets that stay in the system for more than a few months and perhaps none that were created more than six months ago.
The reality of course is somewhat different and currently over 10% of our open incidents tickets date from before 1st June 2016, with a few even dating back to the time before ServiceNow. However, as some will know, we have recently been looking at the very old tickets – that is, those over 18 months old. As a result, a half of those tickets have been closed and we are aiming to have most, if not all, of the rest closed by the end of 2016.
Obviously though, this is an ongoing task and in the next phase we will be looking at the open tickets created before 1st September of last year.
Which is where you come in. Or at least it is if you have any of those aging tickets assigned to you. If that is the case, it would be very good if you could review and resolve the tickets before we get there, possibly coupled with the creation of problem tickets or project tasks as necessary. Of course, if there is a valid reason for any tickets to stay open then that’s fine but as already indicated, we don’t expect there to be many at all.
Please contact me, Keith, if you have any questions about this. And thanks for your help and co-operation.