How to Prioritize Maintenance Tickets Fairly
Your company has developed an app, and many customers use it. Congratulations! Now, it's time to create a process to support it. You've given your customers Zendesk to submit tickets and probably even connected Zendesk tickets to some Jira board to keep everything in one place. The support team works closely with developers, and tickets are being closed, but the developers' bandwidth is limited. This raises the question of how to prioritize tickets and make everyone happy. Your customers want their issues resolved as soon as possible, your board members want to maximize profit and minimize costs, developers need a fair approach, and your support team wants to spend less time grooming the tickets.
Let me share a proven way to make everyone happy.
While being a CTO at Intelligent Systems, I developed a balanced prioritization system to prioritize tickets in an automated way. This system balances customer and company interests. To prioritize any ticket, your team needs to answer several questions, and each answer has a specific weight. Here are examples of questions and their weights:
Is there a workaround available?
How often is this function used by clients?
ABC customer segment:
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How much time is needed to solve the ticket?
In addition, there are some metrics that are calculated automatically:
The story age
As a result of the calculation, you get a number that allows you to prioritize a ticket. This number takes into account all involved sides of your company. As a bonus, you know how to explain to your clients why their ticket will only be addressed next week.
Of course, I don't recommend copying this system and applying it directly to your company. You can use it as an example and create your own system in collaboration with your stakeholders.