The ticket Hell
Problem
If you only have a hammer, all problems look like a nail.
Why do I start with this well-known phrase?, first I want to give a little history and then I will explain why I mention it.
In the infrastructure teams in which I have been working and leading for some years I had the great fortune to cross paths with Juanjo. From minute zero I heard him say, promote and defend him to the hilt:
- Never fall into an infrastructure team that works by ticketing orders
Positioning
What is the rationale behind this firm position?
- You have to have an extremely strong end-to-end culture to be able to determine which ticket is more important than another.
- The infrastructure team inherently has to grow if the technology and product team expands into new functionality.
- It is extremely difficult to keep the infrastructure team motivated.
- It is impossible to innovate from the infrastructure team.
There are several other reasons, but at this point I consider them to be the most important and I will explain each one of them.
1. Extremely strong culture
Both infrastructure and QA teams are not usually involved in the roadmap and technology and product sprint. In case it happens, it is done at the end of the mile “when everything is already cooked”.
Where am I going with this?, that if the infrastructure manager gets two tickets and has to prioritize due to execution capacity issues, the obvious question:
which ticket do I prioritize?
Good luck when you are there, because for customers theirs is the most important thing in the world, and it is the most important thing above anything else.
2. Growth without sense
Let us suppose that the previous point is solved, this point that I am going to explain next will not escape.
Why do we say that infrastructure equipment inherently has to grow?
If we fall into tickets that only the infrastructure team solves, the more products and functionalities the company has, the more people are needed from the infrastructure team to attack the demand for tickets.
Congratulations, you have created an execution funnel.
Solution? hire more talent for the infrastructure team.
3. Motivation
Assume that points 1 and 2 are solved.
The members of the infrastructure team are human, right?
I say this because it is difficult to maintain motivation if –in a job that is highly creativity-driven– we limit team members to “closing tickets” without any room for discussion or double-questioning.
What can happen, high turnover in the infra team and a discomfort in the technology teams that, if they are toxic, can accuse the infra team of blocking or bad experience in infrastructure management.
What can I tell you about the latter, Keep Calm and I leave you a big hug.
4. Innovation
Finally, if we have solved the previous 3 points, it is impossible to innovate, plain and simple.
Why? A team that works simply closing tickets, focused only on participating in a project by creating infrastructure, cannot possibly innovate.
Let’s go back to the beginning
If you only have a hammer, all problems look like a nail.
Throughout the post I explained the rationale and the most important points that a ticketing methodology for infrastructure management will impact.
And I want to make it clear that it is not wrong to work by tickets in an infrastructure team, what is definitely wrong is that infrastructure management is done by tickets.
And what does the hammer phrase? have to do with the fact that an agile methodology was poorly implemented in many companies with the infrastructure teams and “we must stop the ball” to reflect on why things are not working well in many places.
And how can we avoid it?
We must inject a product mindset into infrastructure teams, provide abstractions with top-level experiences of the underlying platform chaos so that product technology teams are self-sufficient in managing the software and associated infrastructure.
I hope my experience will make you rethink how to form culture and work processes for infrastructure teams in the company if you have questions or need to discuss anything of what I wrote I am happy to meet you :)
¡Have a good time! 👋🏽