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Imagine working at a job where you get tickets for every problem that needs to be resolved, and in order to resolve those problems and close the tickets, you need approval from a manager. What would you do if it was hard to track down a manager and get approval?

In this story, one employee found a way to streamline this process. The managers would simply get an email, and all they had to do was respond. Easy peasy, right?

Wrong. The thing is, the managers wouldn’t respond.

Then, he had another idea, and with the blessing of his supervisor, he went ahead with it. The results literally had me laughing out loud.

Keep reading for the whole story.

That time I spammed the VPs with approval from my manager

So in one of my old jobs, I was on a small (5-6 person) helpdesk, and we were using ServiceNow.

After 12+ years in helpdesk, I loved ServiceNow, it just freaking works.

Naturally, I was crushed when we were told one day that it was going away because it costs a damn fortune.

SCSM, as some of you will know, is a Microsoft-produced service tool. It interfaces well with SCCM, but it’s not near as popular. Mostly because it can be like pulling teeth to work with.

He actually got an opportunity to make some positive changes.

All this is a long way of saying that when one of our senior guys quit to take a better job, the whole broken ticket system was dropped in my lap.

I was the only guy on the desk with a CIS degree and I’d been angling for non-helpdesk work for many years, so I was glad to take it on (between calls).

I ran with it.

I hauled that company kicking and screaming into ITIL.

He really streamlined the process!

In the couple years I worked there we went from “every ticket is emailed to helpdesk and autogenerates and incident” to “every service request is submitted via the appropriate form on the self-service portal. Repetitive tasks have been automated, and some ticket types can be completed without a human operator ever seeing them.”

Not bad for having no test environment, no support, no experience, and no documentation.

A big, BIG part of that was manager approvals.

We were used to having to chase down managers to approve things, with tickets stuck in our queues indefinitely until they were completed. I said “forget that” and set up automatic emails to managers with ticket details and hotlinks. They could approve tickets from their iphone inbox in seconds.

But he needed a way to make the managers actually respond to the emails.

No of course everything ran smoothly forever.

Nah, actually what happened was that managers would ignore the emails and then people would get mad that they didn’t have access to that super-private share folder yet.

One day I looked and saw all the tickets backed up waiting for approvals. So I devised a new system. A certain length of time after a ticket came in, the email would be sent again. After that, the email would be re-sent every morning.

I scripted and tested it, then presented it to my manager. I told him “if I turn this on, every manager who has been ghosting us will get spammed HARD.” He gave me the go-ahead.

This made me laugh out loud!

I felt a little spike of glee as I flipped that switch.

Within minutes, my manager had a call direct from a VP: “Why the hell did you just send me 300 emails?!”

The question was asked of me, and my reply was “because he ignored 300 tickets, but find a nicer way to say that I guess. Warn him that it’ll happen again tomorrow morning.”

I think my team lead was chuckling behind me.

Here’s what happened long term.

There was some re-evaluation of who was required to approve things after that.

A lot of stuff would be “inherited upward” when people left the company, so over the years a lot of stuff just floated to the top.

Upper management would ignore the requests, and eventually the users would find their own workarounds. Or someone on helpdesk would just give them the access when it became “urgent”.

It fills me with pride every time I think about the time I was able to expose the IT security negligence of the entire management culture with just one click of a button <3

Just so we’re clear, the problem here is the managers ignoring the emails. All they have to do is reply!

Let’s see how Reddit responded to this story.

Exactly!

This is a good point.

Another person wants clarification.

This person isn’t a fan of ServiceNow.

When the managers don’t want to deal with a problem and keep ignoring it, you have to make it their problem, because in this story, the managers were the problem! They may not admit it, but they were the breakdown in the system. All they had to do was respond to the email. Is that too much to ask? Apparently, it was.