Who keeps it running

This episode is for the IT operations teams who keep it all running, work hard to close every ticket, and still watch them coming back.

A lower ticket count can mean nothing got better.

Jaro Tomik spent years as chief technologist at CDW, coaching service management leaders who were firefighting so hard nobody asked why the fires kept starting.

Every ticket, to him, means IT found out too late.

And this inspired me to invite Jaro onto the podcast. We explore his take on “zero tickets.” Most people hear zero tickets and think fewer tickets. That's the version that failed, because fifteen years of portals and chatbots did nothing but hand the work back to the user.

He believes zero tickets was never about handling problems better. It's about there being nothing to report. That only works if IT knows first, which means pulling together signals it already has and acting on them before anyone picks up the phone. Which turns the daily question from how fast did we fix it into why did it happen in the first place. He also walks through how he takes a leader from "keep the integrations running" to "you're retaining talent" in about six questions.

Two commandments run through this episode:

• #4 - We prevent problems, not just report them.
• #5 - We're the one the business comes to, not the one it works around.

Both sit in the 10 commandments for the ones who keep it running.

What this episode proves: when you do it right, nobody notices.

Here's one of Jaro's quotes that shows how long this has been sitting unsolved:

"Asking end users to raise a ticket each time they have an issue actually does not really make much sense from an enterprise perspective, because I should already know that they need to raise a ticket. I should be well ahead of my game."

4 things you'll take away:

• Why a falling ticket count proves nothing on its own
• Why forty years on, most teams still never get past firefighting
• What changes when you measure problems prevented instead of tickets closed
• How to ladder "we keep it running" up to something the CFO recognises

More info on the guest

• Jaro Tomik, founder Buvalo Ltd
• Website: https://www.buvalo.co.uk/