Nothing makes IT’s job easier than the right policies being implemented.

Imagine working in IT and having nonstop interruptions from staff, which became such a problem that even simple tasks turned into hand-holding sessions, and the only way to fix it was to train the entire company on how to submit a ticket.

What would happen when someone forgot?

In the following story, one person witnesses this very thing happen, and employees would have to be retrained.

Here’s the full scoop.

It’s great when HR has IT’s back

We had a huge issue where staff were contacting IT staff directly via Teams, email, in passing, or just straight up interrupting IT staff when they were doing other jobs to raise their incidents and requests.

Like most large organisations, we wanted all new requests and incidents to come in via the service desk, and offered staff their choice of an email, via an online portal, or calling through via a telephone call to do this.

Whenever we were approached by staff directly as described above, we would always let them know they needed to log a ticket.

It really backed up the IT department.

The problem was that 90% of the time, this would result in, “How do I do that?”

And you would then spend 10-15 minutes with them going through logging a ticket with, “It’s asking me to describe my problem. What do I type in? OK, now it’s asking for my phone number. Do I type in my phone number in there?”

I imagine about half of this was the “I’m not good with computers” (and apparently not good with basic comprehension) type, and the other half was so difficult that the IT person they were speaking to would give up and just do their request without them logging a ticket.

They came up with the perfect solution.

The solution?

Anyone who has worked in a large organisation has probably dealt with mandatory online training/learning. The type that usually relates to safety, whistleblowing, raising grievances, etc., where you do a short online module and have a test at the end, where you need to get something like 90% to 100% to pass.

In this organisation, this was part of the HR system and baked into the HR software package, so HR managed this. We worked with HR to develop a course called “Contacting IT,” which was literally a course on how to log a ticket with us.

Unfortunately, some people still didn’t learn.

And yes, there was a test at the end.

All new starters would needed to complete this before starting, and all existing employees had 6 weeks to complete.

This was great as after that 6 week period, whenever we got a, “I don’t know how to log a ticket,” we could mention that they would have had an online module to complete explaining how to do that, and if they don’t know about this or forgotten what to do, they should contact their manager to request (re)training.

Wow! They must’ve had a lot of issues with this.

Let’s see if the folks over at Reddit relate to this situation.

This is a good idea.

Here’s someone whose company made it simple.

In today’s world, this is a requirement.

Excellent point!

That was the perfect plan! Even if it was probably pretty costly.

Thought that was satisfying? Check out what this employee did when their manager refused to pay for their time while they were traveling for business.