Over seventeen days in August, one of our accountancy clients asked us to reboot the same server seven times. It’s the one that runs their accounting software. Each request was dealt with in under half an hour, and every ticket ended the same way: “Rebooted as requested.”
On a support report, that’s a very good stretch. Seven requests, seven fast resolutions, no complaints, nobody unhappy. But look at it from the finance team’s side. Somewhere along the way, restarting the server became how you get through the day. A restart is a lot easier to ask for than “why does this keep happening?”, and so the question never gets asked.
That’s the trouble with using the ticket count as a measure of IT health. A silent report can mean everything works. It can also mean people have found ways to cope with unreported IT problems.
Why Unreported IT Problems Stop Looking Like Problems
Nobody decides to stop reporting things. It happens in stages. The first time something fails, people report it. If the fix is slow, or the answer is “we’ll look into it”, they report it a bit less next time. After a year of the same issue it stops being a fault and becomes part of the job: you open the application before making coffee, you save a local copy because the shared drive isn’t reliable, you know which colleague to ask when it goes wrong.
Just consider how the reboot tickets were worded. They weren’t titled “accounting software not responding”. They were titled “Reboot [server name]”. The request had been turned into a routine task, which meant nothing in the log looked like a problem.
Some of those reboots may well have been legitimate, to complete updates for example. But none of the tickets said why, and nobody had written it down for us. That’s the part worth noticing.
The Cost of a Five-Minute Wait
Take a smaller example. Say the report your finance team opens every morning takes five minutes to load. That doesn’t sound like much. But across 30 people, once a day, over a 48-week working year, it comes to roughly 600 hours, or around 80 working days spent waiting. That’s before the second spreadsheet someone keeps to check the figures, the manual workarounds and the time spent explaining the quirks to new starters.
There’s a risk that’s easy to miss as well. When one person knows the dozens of unofficial steps that make a process work, the business depends on that person staying. If they leave, a process that looked straightforward turns out to have been held together by habit.
Not Every Ticket is Waste, and Not Every Fix is a Purchase
Finding friction doesn’t mean you need new technology. Sometimes it’s a process, and sometimes it’s a deliberate control.
Over ten weeks, another client sent us 28 requests to set up out-of-office replies and email forwarding. Each took around ten minutes, about five hours in total. Nothing was broken and nobody complained. But it’s the same small task, raised again and again, by people waiting for someone else to do something they could do in a minute.
The obvious fix is to let people do it themselves. But forwarding rules are also a common route for data to leave a mailbox, so in a firm handling client money or confidential files, having a person in the loop may be exactly right. The answer might be a short guide, a standard request form or a better way to approve it. The point is to make that decision on purpose, not to repeat the same ticket because nobody ever questioned it.
It’s also worth being honest that not every workaround deserves attention. A quirk that costs one person thirty seconds a month isn’t worth a project. What matters is how often it happens, how many people it affects and how long it takes. A small delay that hits the whole firm every day matters far more than a big one that hits one person once a year.
And none of this means a low ticket count is bad news. If systems are reliable, processes are clear and people know where to get help, you should see fewer tickets, and that’s what good IT looks like.
A Five-Question Friction Test
If you ask staff “Are you having any unreported IT problems?”, most will say no, and they’ll mean it. Ask what they’ve found a way around instead. You’ll hear things like:
- “I save a copy locally because it’s quicker.”
- “There’s a particular order you have to do things in.”
- “We always check that report against another spreadsheet.”
- “If that happens, we just restart.”
None of those are complaints, but they’re all evidence of friction. Notice the shift in language, too. The employee has stopped thinking “this system doesn’t work properly” and started thinking “this is how you use the system”. Once that happens, nobody raises it, because to them it isn’t a problem.
You don’t need a formal assessment to start. Pick one department and ask:
- What takes longer than it should?
- What do you regularly have to do twice?
- Which system do you avoid unless you have to use it?
- What have you built a workaround for?
- What have you stopped reporting because “that’s just how it works”?
Then look for repetition. If three people independently describe the same workaround, take a closer look. If a whole team has built its own process around an official system, look sooner. And if someone says, “I’ve never really thought about it, but now you mention it…”, pay attention. That’s usually where the most useful findings are.
The same applies to your ticket report. Don’t just count tickets. Look for the same request appearing again and again, and ask what would make it stop.
The difference between a healthy environment and a resigned one is context. If your numbers are falling, that’s good, but it’s worth confirming it’s because things have improved and not because people have stopped expecting change. A report tells you what people are asking for. It can’t tell you what they’ve accepted.
Not sure which one you have?
That’s what our Free Partnership Review Call is for. We talk to your team as well as look at your systems, then explain what’s working, what people are working around and where a simple change would save time and eliminate unreported IT problems.
Call: 01707 378455
Email: hello@tristartechsolutions.co.uk
Frequently Asked Questions
Does having fewer IT support tickets mean a business has good IT? Not necessarily. Fewer tickets can mean systems are reliable, but they can also mean people have got used to problems and work around them instead of reporting them. The only way to tell is to ask them.
Why do employees stop reporting IT problems? When an issue has existed for a long time, it starts to feel like part of the job. People also stop reporting when earlier reports didn’t lead to a fix, or when raising the same thing again feels like complaining.
What is operational friction? It’s anything that makes everyday work slower, more awkward or more repetitive than it needs to be. It can come from technology, from processes, or from how the two fit together.
How can a business find problems that aren’t being reported? Ask people what they work around, what they do twice and what they avoid using. Short conversations with individual departments, and a look for repeated requests in your ticket report, usually uncover more than the ticket count does.
Is it worth fixing every workaround? No. Prioritise by how often it happens, how many people it affects and how long it takes. Fix the frequent, widespread ones first, and leave the rare, trivial ones alone.
What should an MSP look at beyond support tickets? Patterns in the support data, but also how people actually use their systems day to day. A good MSP speaks to users and understands how the technology fits the business, which is how it spots inefficiencies that lead to unreported IT problems.
