What's the best way to determine IT ticket difficulty

Jared Holliday

We had a non-IT vendor come in and show us their ticket statistics and one of their metrics was ticket difficulty. My initial thought is to set a baseline difficulty on each component and have it increment based on time spent open. The field would be manually editable also. Does this sound like a good idea, or has someone done this already? Not looking to add much to our workflow.  

Walter Buggenhout

Hi @Jared Holliday,

If you want to introduce something like this, it will always be a pretty subjective metric. What is difficult for me may very well be a walk in the park for you or vice versa. Before you try to introduce a metric like that, ask yourself how it would help you get things done more effectively.

In one of the software teams I used to work in, we had a habit to categorise bugs as simple or more complex. This qualification was made by the team member who read the bug report just based on gut feeling (and common sense). All we used it for, was to apply a generic estimate to it so it became feasible to add a manageable number of bug fixes in sprint planning.

My advise would be definitely not to over-engineer something like this. At worst, just add a custom field where your agents can indicate if they think it's easy or not. And use metrics like time tracking of ticket lead time to see if seemingly easy tickets are indeed fixed faster than difficult ones. But for prioritising tickets, rather use your SLA's, impact and urgency or stuff like that.

Hope this helps!