APAC: Guidance for ticket work prioritisation and criteria for getting to stability
Problem Statement
What is the problem?
APAC is seeing a large number of breached tickets every day during APAC business hours. This has been happening consistently for the past two to three weeks.
Why is this a problem?
The large number of breached tickets is overwhelming from a workload and prioritisation perspective.
Proposal
Through a clear set of prioritisation guidelines, the APAC managers hope to help support engineers make sense of the work in front of us and better manage the sense of being overwhelmed.
In order of priority, what we should focus on are:
- Having zero new breaches of FRT for
All Regions
andAPAC Preferred Region for Support
Tickets. - Having zero new breaches of NRT for
All Regions
andAPAC Preferred Region for Support
Tickets. - For already breached tickets, working on FRT tickets first, then NRT in the following priority:
-
APAC Preferred Region for Support
tickets. -
All Regions
tickets. -
AMER & EMEA Preferred Region
tickets.
-
- Working on any other ticket, training, or contributions to GitLab.
Additionally:
- Do not assign yourself to tickets which are
AMER or EMEA Preferred Region for Support
.
This applies to both SaaS and Self-Managed tickets.
It is our hope that these guidelines will first get us to some semblance of stability so we can have some breathing room to figure out how we can get to a better and more sustainable place long-term.
Global Support Ticket Handling epic?
How does this guidance relate to theFollow these ticket work priorities until the Zendesk views are updated to enable the new Global Support Ticket Handling workflow and prioritisation.
When that happens, this issue will be closed and everyone should follow the new workflow.
DRI
@weimeng is the DRI for this issue.
Required Resources
- APAC support team cooperation.
- Global support management alignment.
- #3440 (closed) - optional: priority can be followed, adjusting views will help workflows.
Potential Roadblocks/Things to consider
- Should we track APAC-Early and APAC-Middle time segment performance separately?
Desired Outcome
What does success look like?
When All Regions
and APAC Preferred Region for Support
tickets are no longer seeing elevated breaches. We are intentionally choosing not to look at other Preferred Regions tickets for now.
How do we measure success?
We will consider the situation stabilised when APAC-Early and APAC-Middle time segments jointly have:
-
All Regions
andAPAC Preferred Region for Support
FRT breaches below 10% for three straight weeks. -
All Regions
andAPAC Preferred Region for Support
NRT breaches below 20% for three straight weeks.
Note: Though our aim is for zero new breaches of All Regions
and APAC Preferred Region for Support
tickets, these measurements are meant to track if these prioritisation guidelines have a positive impact on our current state of affairs, rather than the complete attainment of the ideal state. This is why the measurements for success is not for breaches at 0%.
We are excluding APAC-Late from consideration as only APAC-Early and APAC-Middle time segments have been impacted by the swell of tickets.
Why 10% FRT and 20% NRT? Isn't this below department KPI targets?
Yes. But historically, this has been the case anyway. And I'll admit that the 10% and 20% targets are eyeballed from the charts below and isn't any more scientific than that.
Keep in mind that these charts exclude AMER and EMEA preferred region tickets for the purposes of this proposal and do not paint the full picture that we may see in Zendesk.
Why exclude the APAC-Late time segment?
This is because the APAC-Late time segment has not been affected as much and performance levels are currently at or near department-level KPI targets:
Keep in mind that these charts exclude AMER and EMEA preferred region tickets for the purposes of this proposal and do not paint the full picture that we may see in Zendesk.
Where would future feedback go?
Right here, in the comments.