Ticket Triage

When customers, partners or VSHNeers create new tickets, they pop up in Triage filters we use in each tech team. The responsibility is to triage these ticket and refine them into a usable state.

VSHNeers create tickets in Jira directly, and ensure it’s of good enough quality to make triage easy or obsolete. Customers can create tickets either via the VSHN Portal or E-Mail to support@vshn.ch.

1st stage Triage

In the first stage of the triage process we find out whether the ticket is further triaged and refined by your team or not.

You find the link to the Jira Dashboard with all necessary filters on the wiki homepage of your team.

How we do 1st stage Triage is documented in the wiki, as this procedure is still changing a lot.

Your team handles the following interrupt based type of work:

Classification	Description	Action
Incident	Unplanned interruption to or quality reduction of a service	Refine task to usable state and resolve incident.
Incident Prevention	Prevent an Incident proactively. Usually with the help of monitoring / graphs, for example a disk filling up, etc.	Resolve the situation to prevent potential Incident. Create Problem task for the Home-Team to solve the underlying issue.
Request	Request from a customer (or internally) for information, advice, a easy and standard change, or access to a service	Clarify requirements (with customer), assess (authorization, feasibility, security, effort, impact, etc.), work on and complete task. Transform into a Change if needed.

Classification

Description

Action

Incident

Unplanned interruption to or quality reduction of a service

Refine task to usable state and resolve incident.

Incident Prevention

Prevent an Incident proactively. Usually with the help of monitoring / graphs, for example a disk filling up, etc.

Resolve the situation to prevent potential Incident. Create Problem task for the Home-Team to solve the underlying issue.

Request

Request from a customer (or internally) for information, advice, a easy and standard change, or access to a service

Clarify requirements (with customer), assess (authorization, feasibility, security, effort, impact, etc.), work on and complete task. Transform into a Change if needed.

The following task are usually not considered interrupt based work and can be planned by your team:

Classification	Description	Action
Change	The addition, modification or removal of anything that could have an impact on a running service.	Handover to the Service Manager or the Technical Service Manager for clarification and further refinement. Assign to Home-Team if clear which Team.
Problem	Root-cause analysis and potential resolution planning for one or more current, potential and past Incidents	Handover to the Service Manager, the Technical Service Manager or the Product Owner for clarification and further planning. Assign to Home-Team if clear which Team.
Project Task	A task belonging to a running project.	Handover to the Project Manager of the project for further refinement and planning.
Everything else	Tasks not fitting into this classification table, for example: Sales, backoffice, finance and organizational development tasks, Research task and similar.	Check with the creator of the ticket to handle the ticket to a point that it doesn’t longer show up in Triage filters.

Classification

Description

Action

Change

The addition, modification or removal of anything that could have an impact on a running service.

Handover to the Service Manager or the Technical Service Manager for clarification and further refinement. Assign to Home-Team if clear which Team.

Problem

Root-cause analysis and potential resolution planning for one or more current, potential and past Incidents

Handover to the Service Manager, the Technical Service Manager or the Product Owner for clarification and further planning. Assign to Home-Team if clear which Team.

Project Task

A task belonging to a running project.

Handover to the Project Manager of the project for further refinement and planning.

Everything else

Tasks not fitting into this classification table, for example: Sales, backoffice, finance and organizational development tasks, Research task and similar.

Check with the creator of the ticket to handle the ticket to a point that it doesn’t longer show up in Triage filters.

2nd stage Triage

Done by the Ticket Triage VSHNeer or the VSHNeer starting to work on a urgent ticket for all tickets that come from 1st stage Triage
Depending on the urgency, resolving the Incident is usually more important than refining the ticket.

Goals

Ensure ticket quality
- Make it possible to review tickets (task deliverables, reproduce issue, etc.)
- Eliminate misunderstandings between customer / VSHN
- Make tickets look the same, where useful. No one likes to start working on ugly tickets
Have estimates on bigger tasks
- Make it possible to escalate when estimate is reached soon
Actually Select the ticket, so that it appears on Kanban Board

How we do 2nd stage Triage is documented in the wiki, as this procedure is still changing a lot.