It Never Ends

Work Rant --

I have been working for months trying to clean up a huge backlog of tickets that have fallen into "the black hole" over the past 12 months. I have had some degree of success. My boss told me he has stopped getting beat up in the meetings and has now been given a "good job" nod from mgmt. I am feeling pretty good about all this. The stats are looking up, closure rate is good, our Service Levels (SL) are being met. Then I get hit with one out of left field.

From a forwarded e-mail:

"El Gee, can you give me an idea what is going on with case 12345678?"

I go an do a query on the case and it does not belong to us. As a matter of fact, it is halfway around the globe and has been resolved. Rather than respond back to my boss "No trouble found", I read the e-mail attached to see what HE was sent.

The e-mail originated from our Monitoring Center in Asia. They use a tool that generates tickets when network devices, servers, etc fail tests (ping, load, cpu, memory, disc space, etc). These tickets are worked by the team in Asia and if they cannot resolve them, they send them to the team that works that particular platform (network, telecom, Unix, Windows, etc). None of us at the site I work at knew that these cases were assigned to us. When I researched this, I found 446 open cases in our queue. How did all of us miss this large number of tickets? I have to compare the tool we use to Outlook (it looks a lot like it).

In Outlook, you have shortcut buttons that take you to your Calendar, Mailbox, Task List, etc. If you want to see your calendar, you click on it. If you want to see the journal, you click on it. When we were trained on this tool, we were told we only needed to look at the Service Calls. We had no need to use the other shortcuts. We were told that other people would monitor the work orders, auto generated tickets, and RFC's (requests for corrective action). It appears that this monitoring / auto ticket creation went live and we were not told our part in the puzzle. So now we have some real work to do.

So to bring you up to speed, I have spent the last 2 days sorting the alarm tickets out, closing what I can and forwarding the others on to mgmt. My bosses boss told me yesterday not to worry, because we are not being penalized for missing the SL on these. He told me to close what I could and evaluate the rest. So I closed 200+ alarms and created a report listing the others and send it to my TL and my boss.

My question is, if these are to be worked why are they in a separate area? The tickets look almost exactly like the regular work orders. They have the same severity. They need attention.

I guess I should be relieved. We only had about 450. The Windows group has 1600 to sort through. The LAN group only has a couple of hundred.

Back to work :-(