When a company is small with a small IT team of 3 people, it’s easy where all the tickets assigned can be communicated internally. But when it starts growing, assignment, responsibility and ownership becomes a big headache. Let say in a typical environment of a 200 staff IT company. We have the following teams: windows, DB, helpdesk, infra, network, app. And this is just the basic. Sub defined, we still have DB-oracle, DB-SQL, DB-MVS, DB-DWH…. And in 1 team, there’s 2-3 engineers handling the same job, so who should this ticket go to?!
When a company is small with a small IT team of 3 people, it’s easy where all the tickets assigned can be communicated internally. But when it starts growing, assignment, responsibility and ownership becomes a big headache. Let say in a typical environment of a 200 staff IT company. We have the following teams: windows, DB, helpdesk, infra, network, app. And this is just the basic. Sub defined, we still have DB-oracle, DB-SQL, DB-MVS, DB-DWH…. And in 1 team, there’s 2-3 engineers handling the same job, so who should this ticket go to?!
Based on Footprints assignment types and setups available, we can breakup into 3 different methods:
a. Leave it as team assignment: In such scenario, all the members of the team is assigned and notified via email. This is a very versatile method where the team’s due diligence is required. Whoever is free will help out the team by going to the ticket to do a “taking” where he claims responsibility and ownership of the task. Usually, such methods should come with a rewards program, rewarding the staff with the most ticket completed. It works quite well if the team is hardworking and reduces a lot of management work.
b. Team lead assignment: This is where Footprints assigns the team lead automatically and then the team lead will then decide who should handle this job. On the positive side, he is aware on the tasks his staff is handling and their job load, but on the negative side, he is spending time of his own just doing ticket assignments.
c. Round Robin assignment: This method is the fairest of all, where FP automatically assigns based on a round-robin rule. Everyone’s ticket is distributed evenly among the team, but when the troublesome tickets keep getting routed to you, don’t blame FP, its pure luck!