3 ms·

Being the admin, I'm pretty sensitive to: 1) People trying to bump the priority of their own tickets by showing up in my cube. This is inevitably at the expens

by ora600 16y ago

Being the admin, I'm pretty sensitive to: 1) People trying to bump the priority of their own tickets by showing up in my cube. This is inevitably at the expense of other, more polite, users of the system. Prioritizing requests is one of the toughest parts of operations job - if you think I'm doing it all wrong, you can talk to my manager. 2) People who think that "open a ticket" means "go to hell". It actually means "We need to document all changes done to production and we need to prioritize requests. Please help us do our job by using the system designed to do so. The request will be done within 5 minutes if its urgent/important/really simple. But we still need a ticket to document it and follow up if it causes issues in the future." On the other hand, if you boss is competent, he can raise the availability and priorities of admins in all kinds of management meetings. Hopefully resulting in better priority for developer requests and maybe even hiring few more admins.

sbov 16y ago
I don't work in such an environment, so what is the proper response to a ticket that took a week to process and is closed with no useful detail? Open another ticket to ask for more detail on why the previous ticket was closed?
- swombat 16y ago
  Make friends with some sysadmins. When the gears aren't spinning, ping them on IM to find out why. Usually there's a very good reason for that. Sysadmins are your friends if you treat them well, like human beings, and you respect their work. If you treat them like a ticket processing machine, or worse, like an obstacle, you'll struggle. I learned this from 4 years of deploying apps at UBS (one of the world's largest banks), which had exactly this kind of ticketing system (called GCMS, iirc). I was IRC-pals with 3 different sysadmins in 3 different continents (yes, there was an internal IRC system), and so whenever things got stuck in the pipes, I could ask them to have a look in the system and see what was going on. As for the other sysadmins, I always treated them courteously, used the ticket system, and got the necessary approvals whenever I could. The one downside of this is I ended up being stuck managing lots of deployments, because I was good at it.
  - j_baker 16y ago
    I think this goes both ways. I understand that sysadmins are human and get busy and/or make mistakes. Most of the time though, nagging developers could be pleased by sysadmins being a bit more proactive in communicating with people. After all, when a ticket has been open for a week with no response, most people will start to get a bit frustrated and take it out on the sysadmin. A simple "Hey, know you've been waiting on this a while, but I have X, Y, and Z to take care of before I can get to it" will do wonders for sysadmin/developer relations.
    - dedward 16y ago
      It goes a bit deeper than that - a ticketing system by itself is just a tool, and isn't a process or a solution. If Sysadmin just threw up a ticketing system and said "put your stuff in there and we'll get to it" - then they can't expect things to get much better than email. It's a start, but only a small one. They need to put the proper process, SLA's (even if they are approximate) and review procedures around the system to make sure it's meeting the needs of the rest of they organisation.

by ora600 16y ago

sbov 16y ago

I don't work in such an environment, so what is the proper response to a ticket that took a week to process and is closed with no useful detail? Open another ticket to ask for more detail on why the previous ticket was closed?

swombat 16y ago
Make friends with some sysadmins. When the gears aren't spinning, ping them on IM to find out why. Usually there's a very good reason for that. Sysadmins are your friends if you treat them well, like human beings, and you respect their work. If you treat them like a ticket processing machine, or worse, like an obstacle, you'll struggle. I learned this from 4 years of deploying apps at UBS (one of the world's largest banks), which had exactly this kind of ticketing system (called GCMS, iirc). I was IRC-pals with 3 different sysadmins in 3 different continents (yes, there was an internal IRC system), and so whenever things got stuck in the pipes, I could ask them to have a look in the system and see what was going on. As for the other sysadmins, I always treated them courteously, used the ticket system, and got the necessary approvals whenever I could. The one downside of this is I ended up being stuck managing lots of deployments, because I was good at it.
- j_baker 16y ago
  I think this goes both ways. I understand that sysadmins are human and get busy and/or make mistakes. Most of the time though, nagging developers could be pleased by sysadmins being a bit more proactive in communicating with people. After all, when a ticket has been open for a week with no response, most people will start to get a bit frustrated and take it out on the sysadmin. A simple "Hey, know you've been waiting on this a while, but I have X, Y, and Z to take care of before I can get to it" will do wonders for sysadmin/developer relations.
  - dedward 16y ago
    It goes a bit deeper than that - a ticketing system by itself is just a tool, and isn't a process or a solution. If Sysadmin just threw up a ticketing system and said "put your stuff in there and we'll get to it" - then they can't expect things to get much better than email. It's a start, but only a small one. They need to put the proper process, SLA's (even if they are approximate) and review procedures around the system to make sure it's meeting the needs of the rest of they organisation.