I Set Up a Helpdesk Style Ticketing System to Manage My Life
I’ve worked in Information Technology my entire adult life. Let’s call it twenty-five years and counting. The last six years I’ve spent as the Director of Information Technology for a group of physician specialists. I try to be fairly realistic, so my self-assessment is that I’m doing a passable job in this role most of the time but that I’m far from excelling. Too often people have to ask me for things more than once before they get done. And there are more than a few things that never get done before the requester either gives up or forgets.
I’m certainly busier than I used to be and it just keeps increasing. This year I’ve received or sent over 1,900 e-mail messages per week at my work address. Last year it was only 1,400 per week. On top of those e-mails are plenty of phone calls, texts, meetings and the occasional walk-by request. More than a few of these contacts are important, asking for information or action that my current team of eight and I are expected to deliver.
To borrow a well-worn analogy, my life feels like drinking from a firehose. Of course if one actually tried to drink from a firehose, I imagine only taking a small gulp from a very large stream while 99.999% of the water rushed right by.
Like most IT departments, we’ve long had an internal helpdesk ticketing system to track user requests. The software isn’t bad, but it’s not what I’d call great, nor is it 100% reliable. It’s an on-premises system that installs on top of common server technologies. This helpdesk ticketing system does all the basics. A user e-mails in a request and a ticket is automatically generated. A helpdesk team member can also initiate a ticket from a phone call or other customer interaction. Actions and time can be documented in the ticket before it’s ultimately closed. I don’t think any of our team really likes this particular system, but because we’re all familiar with it, those who have to use it do.
As Director, I receive a lot of requests and sometimes act as a second pathway into the IT helpdesk or department. If a physician calls, texts or e-mails me directly, I’m going to do what I can for them before handing them off to a member of our team. Sometimes, as the guy in charge, I know a lot about a topic. Sometimes I know significantly less than the people who answer our phones every day and who may have dealt with a particular issue several times in the last week. We have many and diverse specialties among the team.
A thought popped into my head recently. That thought: “I wish I could turn my whole e-mail inbox into a helpdesk ticketing system so that issues stay in front of me until they’re resolved.” Of course that’s not entirely realistic. Of those 1,900 e-mail messages per week, I couldn’t deliver a meaningful response to a high percentage of them even if all I did was type all day. Never mind that some of these issues require hours of research, meetings or activity to resolve.
My personal life has far fewer demands, thank goodness. I’m single with no dependents. And except where I allow work to intrude into my personal time, my time is otherwise my own. Despite this, there are plenty of things that I don’t get done that I either need to or want to get done.
There are plenty of ways to organize oneself, from a simple task list written on a piece of paper to dividing e-mail into folders, to creating a list in Excel or something. So why did I deploy a helpdesk ticketing system as the way to organize my life? And what did I learn in the process?
First the Why
I chose a helpdesk-style ticketing system mostly because that’s the way I think and what I’m accustomed to. This might not be an intuitive choice for someone working in a creative role, for instance, but it’s something that I’ve had exposure to for my entire adult life.
One of my intentions is to increase my productivity and not let the truly important things slip by unattended until they’re replaced by the next request coming in. A ticketing system keeps issues alive until I close them.
I also like what I’ve seen from gamification. Sometimes it feels good to keep score. To see points accumulating or tickets closing or something. I hope that the desire to knock a few more tasks off the open ticket list helps motivate me at the end of the day slightly more than a general need to keep working.
How Did I Do It?
How does one set up a helpdesk ticketing system these days? The short answer is, “In the cloud.” A Google search of “cloud based helpdesk solutions” or similar yields several options. I was under the assumption — later proved correct — that I would be able to set one of these up in a single day.
I wanted to do it all. A new domain name. New e-mail hosting and address. A helpdesk ticketing system fed by the new e-mail address.
So I started by searching for a domain name at GoDaddy. I wasn’t creatively inspired that day, so I ended up picking a domain name based on a common term used in the medical specialty of the physician group that I serve. The term isn’t relevant to this article, and while I may link the domain to this article, I’m not going to link this article back to my domain. I don’t love the idea of randos creating ticket requests for me.
Next I began looking at cloud-based helpdesk ticketing systems while paying attention to whether any of them also provide e-mail hosting services. That’s how I landed on Zoho. They offer quite a few cloud services including e-mail, helpdesk, customer relationship management and quite a few others. I set up Zoho Mail Premium to use the domain name I purchased earlier.
Once I’d set up and tested the e-mail, I then started setting up Zoho Desk Standard. There are several levels of Zoho Desk depending on one’s needs, and each is available as a free trial. I set up my Desk — or helpdesk — on the first day and didn’t actually pay for it until I’d used it for a few days successfully. There’s little financial risk in running a proof of concept evaluation of this or similar platforms now.
Issues That I Considered Along the Way
- HIPAA
Since I work in healthcare, one has to be very aware of not violating the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). The financial and legal consequences are catastrophic and for good reason. While Zoho has undergone a SOC 2+ HIPAA Type 2 Examination and could likely be used to support a healthcare organization directly, that would require the healthcare entity and Zoho signing what’s known as a Business Associates Agreement. I as an individual employee can’t and wouldn’t store Protected Health Information (PHI) in any system that’s not officially used by the organization I work for, with all the proper paperwork in place. At the same time, I’m not the only manager or executive who uses personally-selected tools to better organize their professional life. Milanote is another tool that some of my colleagues have used and continue to use to keep themselves on track. As the sole manager of my personal ticketing system, I can curate and generalize the information that goes into it. Just to be safe, I did go ahead and add a disclaimer to all the automatically generated replies that my system can generate.
2. E-Mail Setup and Authenticity Is Non-Trivial These Days
I don’t want my domain or e-mail address to ever be spoofed in spam e-mail messages, so I set up Sender Policy Framework (SPF), DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) and Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance (DMARC) records for my domain. If any of this sounds daunting, Zoho does give you the values to set up in your Domain Name System (DNS). I’m also testing Dmarcian to evaluate all the DMARC reports and tell me if any of my e-mail security isn’t set up properly. This is stuff that an IT person breezes through, particularly if they’ve done it several times before.
3. A Single Day
It is totally possible to set up a cloud-based helpdesk ticketing system in one day if you’ve got experience with all of the technologies involved and can unilaterally make all decisions from technical to semantics. If you don’t have all of this going for you, it’ll take longer. Be realistic in setting your expectations.
What I Hope to Learn Going Forward
- What Is My Capacity?
I happened to set up my ticketing system at the start of a week’s vacation, meaning that I wasn’t officially working on ‘work’ for the seven days that I’ve used it and written this article. Still, including several test tickets, I’ve added over 100 professional and personal tasks to my ticketing system and closed about 35. It’s possible that when I start using this during a standard workweek, I learn that the firehose analogy was accurate and that there’s simply too much coming at me. At that point I’ll have to choose whether better delegation is an option or whether my whole team is at or beyond 100% capacity and we need to try to right-size either capacity or demand.
2. Start Thinking About Return on Investment
It also occurs to me that not all tasks have the same value, whether we’re talking professionally or personally. At work it’s easy to think, “Well, they’re paying me, so I better do everything they ask if I can.” But we really all have a responsibility to make the best use of the business resources we’ve been entrusted with, and that probably includes our own time most of all. If we’re at capacity and the nature of our job requires us to choose where to focus, then we have to start thinking about the return on investment for the actions that we undertake. Maybe that doctor’s question about brand-x personal laptop that he wants to buy online is of less value to the organization than a project that affects the organization as a whole. Maybe if I knew that I had 275 open tickets, I’d say, “I’ve created a reminder for myself and will get to this as soon as I’m able, but that may be in a month.” Or if I was dealing with this hypothetical request frequently, I’d realize that we need to publish and maintain a list of recommended equipment rather than dealing with one-off questions all the time. Regularly thinking about ROI would help me make better use of my personal time as well.
The Experiment
So, will this experiment be a success? Will it be worth it to have set up a helpdesk style ticketing system to manage my life? Will I better capture and follow through on the things that are asked of me? Will I improve my reputation for consistency? Will I learn or demonstrate that my or my team’s capacity is out of sync with demand? Will I focus on the ROI of activities as a way to prioritize or even say no to some? All of these things outcomes are yet to be shown. But I do love a good proof of concept.
For anyone contemplating a similar thing, my costs were one day of my personal time plus the following:
Domain Registration (GoDaddy, 5 years) $43.85
Zoho Mail Premium (w/ 1 user, 1 year) 70.19
Zoho Desk Standard (w/ 1 agent, 1 year) $170.25
Dmarcian DMARC Report Processing (free or $239.88 per year)