Tickets Make Operations Unnecessarily Miserable

IT operations face challenges of excessive workloads, interruptions, and pressure from executives, which have led organizations to rely heavily on ticket-driven work management systems. Despite adopting new platforms and management frameworks, the stress on operations teams persists, and ticket queues are identified as a major contributor to inefficiency. Ticket queues introduce delays, miscommunication, bottlenecks, siloed work, and management overhead, obscuring the value stream and inhibiting learning and feedback loops. While tickets can be useful for specific tasks like logging exceptions or documenting communication, their overuse in complex knowledge work is costly. To address these issues, organizations are encouraged to redesign workflows to minimize handoffs, adopt self-service automation, and eliminate unnecessary ticket queues, thus improving efficiency and reducing operational strain.