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My issue with ticketing systems is similar to most issues I have with this industry: cognitive dissonance. On the one hand, companies ask me to put all this wo

My issue with ticketing systems is similar to most issues I have with this industry: cognitive dissonance. On the one hand, companies ask me to put all this work into my tickets. Fill out this field, fill out that field, link to this thing, organize it this way... etc. On the other hand, the company puts NEAR ZERO real effort into making this experience easy and efficient. I've seen it happen most often with companies that flip-flop between defining themselves as a "start-up" but in the same breath talk about their worldwide enterprise presence. Of course they have 500+ employees. Sometimes thousands. They like to put on their startup hat when refusing to pay money for things and they like to put on their large scale enterprise hat when instituting ticket requirement policies.

blowski 5y ago
That’s not cognitive dissonance. It’s just the tendency of human ambition to outstrip action because of myriad reasons - lack of expertise normally being the root cause. It’s the same reason my shed is filled with expensive tools I’ve used once.
meowface 5y ago
Don't make me context switch between being an engineer/designer and being a bureaucrat. That's all I ask. (Okay, not all. It'd also be nice to have ticketing/project management software that isn't super ugly, clunky, and slow.)
truffdog 5y ago
And then you discover that no one ever reads any of the tickets.
- nmstoker 5y ago
  It really does feel like reading comprehension limitations are a major barrier to people helping themselves. Even trivial amounts of text can put people off, even when the individuals are supposedly high calibre (ie university educated/heavily interviewed) The problem is this encourages brevity to the point of omission by the writers of tickets and then these various ticketing systems lose a big chunk of their value because no one has much of a clue what they're for afterwards!
  - whall6 5y ago
    I’ve noticed that several times this is because the ticket writers might not really completely understand what they’re trying to say either.
nanidin 5y ago
I worked under a director whose resume padding for the job was going to be switching from JIRA to Salesforce for tickets. JIRA worked well for engineers and QA, but management wasn’t getting the types of reports they wanted. Reportedly. Our JIRA implementation had evolved over several years and we had 50-100 people familiar with it and happy with it. When we started down the path toward Salesforce-ification, it involved lots of bulleted feature lists. Maybe 1-2 wireframes. Then this was handed to contractors who implemented it exactly as written without an eye towards usability. Simple things like saving a ticket with some fields blank or unknown we’re not supported and made the entire ticketing process miserable. I eventually stepped in as the voice of the “customer”, customer in this case being fellow engineers and support staff. I eventually left the company before the final implementation, but even by then no one prioritized usability and design.

blowski 5y ago

That’s not cognitive dissonance. It’s just the tendency of human ambition to outstrip action because of myriad reasons - lack of expertise normally being the root cause. It’s the same reason my shed is filled with expensive tools I’ve used once.

meowface 5y ago

Don't make me context switch between being an engineer/designer and being a bureaucrat. That's all I ask. (Okay, not all. It'd also be nice to have ticketing/project management software that isn't super ugly, clunky, and slow.)

truffdog 5y ago

And then you discover that no one ever reads any of the tickets.

nmstoker 5y ago
It really does feel like reading comprehension limitations are a major barrier to people helping themselves. Even trivial amounts of text can put people off, even when the individuals are supposedly high calibre (ie university educated/heavily interviewed) The problem is this encourages brevity to the point of omission by the writers of tickets and then these various ticketing systems lose a big chunk of their value because no one has much of a clue what they're for afterwards!
- whall6 5y ago
  I’ve noticed that several times this is because the ticket writers might not really completely understand what they’re trying to say either.

nanidin 5y ago

I worked under a director whose resume padding for the job was going to be switching from JIRA to Salesforce for tickets. JIRA worked well for engineers and QA, but management wasn’t getting the types of reports they wanted. Reportedly. Our JIRA implementation had evolved over several years and we had 50-100 people familiar with it and happy with it. When we started down the path toward Salesforce-ification, it involved lots of bulleted feature lists. Maybe 1-2 wireframes. Then this was handed to contractors who implemented it exactly as written without an eye towards usability. Simple things like saving a ticket with some fields blank or unknown we’re not supported and made the entire ticketing process miserable. I eventually stepped in as the voice of the “customer”, customer in this case being fellow engineers and support staff. I eventually left the company before the final implementation, but even by then no one prioritized usability and design.