Bouncing Tickets: A Problem to Solve
This was me. I won’t say when, but you’ll get the idea. I was not pleased, and we had a problem to fix.
The scenario? A ticket bounced between four people before being escalated to someone who finally took ownership. We added three hours to the resolution time because we played "hot potato." That’s wasted time and effort. It also caused an impact on our clinical operations. I met with my team and asked how we could create a culture where the first person who gets a ticket pulls in everyone they need to help resolve it quickly. I wondered, out loud, why we were not using ticket swarming.
The Room Fell Silent
The response? Silence. Looks of confusion. Finally, one brave team member asked, “What’s ticket swarming?”
Doh! Another leadership misstep. I had assumed they had IT operations knowledge that they didn’t. So, let's back up and talk about what ticket swarming is and why it's essential for resolving high-priority issues.
What is Ticket Swarming?
We all know about major incident management (MIM) — the highest-priority tickets when something critical has broken, causing significant impact. Think of situations where the finance system is down or hospitals can't access electronic health records or administer medication. In these cases, MIM protocols are activated, and everyone rushes to fix the issue.
But what about the next tier down of tickets? They’re still important but don’t quite reach MIM level. Maybe it’s a single application outage affecting one of your 15 locations, or maybe a system is down for a few hours, but the impact is extremely limited. These situations don’t call for the MIM protocol to be activated, but they still need quick resolution by a group of people. This is where ticket swarming comes in.
Swarming: From Theory to Practice
Ticket swarming is a collaborative, real-time response to an issue. Instead of the ticket being passed from one team or person to the next (like in the tiered support model), swarming brings the necessary experts together as soon as the ticket lands. Whoever receives the ticket first doesn't try to figure it out alone or escalate it through the ranks. Instead, they call in the right people immediately and collaborate on a solution.
This approach reduces handoffs, speeds up resolution time, and ensures that all the expertise needed is in the room (or virtual room) at once. As Jonathan Rende describes in his Forbes article, swarming eliminates the traditional hierarchy of incident response. Instead of waiting for a tiered escalation process, the team takes ownership of the issue from the start, which leads to faster results, smaller ticket backlogs, and a more accountable, empowered team (Swarming: How To Reduce Handoffs And Differentiate On Critical Customer Support).
By creating a culture of ticket swarming, we eliminate the "hot potato" syndrome where tickets get passed around. We stop losing time and start resolving issues more efficiently. The key is empowering your team to know they can pull in the right experts at the right time — not wait for formal escalation. Additionally, we must set the expectation to respond to such calls for help quickly. It is one thing to call expert to swarm, its another to get them to respond.
Putting Swarming Into Action
So, what did my team and I do next? We developed a process to launch ticket swarming for these high-priority, non-MIM issues. This was added as a reportable feature in our ticketing system so we could track when swarming was used. Initially, there were concerns about being “called at all hours” and how this might disrupt schedules. But the data didn’t support that fear. After 90 days, the process had only been used three times, and we agreed it could have been used more often.
Once we got comfortable with it, swarming became a highly collaborative and popular way to resolve issues quickly. It changed the culture of how we handled these high-priority tickets. People felt empowered to resolve problems faster, and the reduction in back-and-forth handoffs saved significant time. We no longer felt like we were “bothering” one another or “asking for favors” when we called for a ticket swarm. We also had language when we need to adjust meetings if such an event was happening. This significantly reduced stress and improved our ability to restore services quickly
Does Your Team Swarm?
Does your team use ticket swarming, formally or informally? If not, it might be time to consider introducing this approach, especially for high-priority tickets that don’t meet MIM criteria. You could find that it not only speeds up resolution times but also fosters a culture of accountability and collaboration across your teams.
Comments