By Pierre Moncassin
When incident tickets are repeatedly passed from one support team to another, I like to describe it as a “ping pong” situation. Most often this is not a lack of accountability or skills within individual teams. Each team genuinely fails to see the incident as relevant to their technical silo. They each feel perfectly legitimate in either assigning the ticket to another team, or even assigning it back to the team they took it from.
And the ping pong game continues.
Unfortunately for the end user, the incident is not resolved whilst the reassignments continue. The situation can easily escalate into SLA breaches, financial penalties, and certainly disgruntled end users.
How can you prevent such situations? IT service management (ITSM) has been around for a long while, and there are known mitigations to handle these situations. Good ITSM practice would dictate some type of built-in mechanisms to prevent incidents being passed back and forth. For example:
- Define end-to-end SLAs for incident resolution (not just KPIs for each resolution team), and make each team aware of these SLAs.
- Configure the service desk tool to escalate automatically (and issue alerts) after a number of reassignments, so that management becomes quickly aware of the situation.
- Include cross-functional resolution teams as part of the resolution process (as is often done for major incident situations).
In my opinion there is a drawback to these approaches—they take time and effort to put in place; incidents may still fall through the cracks. But with a cloud management platform like VMware vRealize Suite, you can take prevention to another level.
A core reason for ping pong situations often lies in the team’s inability to pinpoint the root cause of the incident. VMware vRealize Operations Manager (formerly known as vCenter Operations Manager) provides increased visibility into the root cause, through root cause analysis capabilities. Going one step further, vRealize Operations Manager gives advance warning on impending incidents—thanks to its analytical capabilities. In the most efficient scenario, support teams are warned of the impending incident and its cause, well ahead of the incident being raised. Most of the time, the incident ping pong game should never start.
Takeaways:
- Build a solid foundation with the classic ITSM approaches based on SLAs and assignment rules.
- Leverage proactive resolution, and take advantage of enhanced root cause analysis that vRealize Operations Manager offers via automation to reduce time wasted on incident resolution.
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Pierre Moncassin is an operations architect with the VMware Operations Transformation global practice and is based in Taipei. Follow @VMwareCloudOps on Twitter for future updates.
