Lessons · IT support · what you are giving up
You cannot do it all, so decide what you are giving up
Every priority matrix tells you what to do first. None of them tells you what happens to the ticket you put second, and that is the decision that actually costs something. Triage is not ranking; it is spending a fixed number of minutes and knowing, before you spend them, which thing you have chosen to let get worse.
Hone is a place to practise a career, one idea a day. This is one of its lessons, written out in full and free to read without an account.
In beta. This lesson was written for Hone and has not yet been checked by an experienced systems administrator. Practice material, not professional advice. What that means.
What it is for
The queue is never empty and it does not pause while you work. An hour spent well on a P2 is an hour in which a P1 you had not looked at yet went from a caller waiting to a floor sending people home. Nobody is written up for the ticket they fixed. They are asked about the one nobody touched.
How to think about it
Before you pick anything up, read the whole board once. For each thing ask three questions and write the answers down: how long has this been sitting, how long will it take me, and what does it become if I leave it another half hour. Then take the one whose third answer is worst, not the one whose first answer is loudest. When two are equally bad, take the short one first, because finishing it buys you back the minutes to do the other.
Worked example
09:00 Ticket A, one user, cannot print. Landed 09:00.Twenty minutes to fix. If it waits an hour it is still one user who cannot print.
09:05 Ticket B, the goods-out scanner is dead. Landed 09:05.Ten minutes to fix. If it waits half an hour the vans miss the run and the day is gone.
Read both before touching either.A is older and A is louder. B is the one that changes if you are slow.
Take B at 09:05, finish 09:15. Take A at 09:15, finish 09:35.Both done, nothing lost. Twenty-five minutes of work, both inside their window.
Take A at 09:00, finish 09:20. Take B at 09:20, finish 09:30.Both tickets closed, and the vans went out late. The board looks identical at 09:30.
That is the whole lesson.Two orderings, same tickets, same minutes, same closed count. One of them cost the company a delivery run, and no report you file afterwards will show the difference.
Your turn
Two land together. One is a director's mailbox, fifteen minutes, no deadline on it. One is the payroll export, five minutes, and the bank cut-off is in twenty. Which do you start?
Start with , because the other one is the same problem in an hour.
Solve one, graded on the server
The trap
Working the board in the order it arrived. A queue sorted by arrival is sorted by the one thing that has no bearing on what it costs to wait, and it feels fair while it is going wrong.