#TechWorkers #MSP #TechSupport #WorkplaceIssues
Are you fed up with your coworkers cherry-picking the easy tickets, leaving you with the more challenging and time-consuming tasks? 🙄 It can be incredibly frustrating to feel like you’re carrying the weight of the team while others skate by with simple assignments. But fear not, there are strategies you can implement to navigate this situation and ensure that your workload is fair and balanced.
## The Problem at Hand
Working at a MSP can be demanding, especially when you’re juggling multiple responsibilities without a clear leader in place. It’s common for some team members to gravitate towards easier tasks, leaving the more complex tickets for others to handle. This not only creates an imbalance in workload distribution but can also lead to feelings of resentment and burnout among team members.
### Current Scenario
– Limited manpower: With just a few team members handling a large volume of tickets, the workload distribution becomes critical.
– Lack of leadership: Without a dedicated SD lead, there’s no one overseeing individual team members and ensuring fair distribution of tasks.
– Cherry-picking behavior: Some team members tend to choose the easier tickets, leaving others with more challenging assignments.
## Dealing with Cherry-Picking Behavior
As the new guy in the team, it’s important to establish boundaries and advocate for yourself to ensure that you’re not being taken advantage of. Here are some tips on how to address the cherry-picking behavior and create a more equitable work environment:
1. **Communicate openly:** Have a candid conversation with your team members about workload distribution and express your concerns about the current imbalance.
2. **Set expectations:** Clearly define roles and responsibilities within the team to ensure that everyone is contributing equally.
3. **Rotate assignments:** Implement a rotation system for ticket assignments to ensure that everyone gets a fair share of both easy and challenging tasks.
4. **Track performance:** Keep track of each team member’s performance and make adjustments as needed to ensure fairness.
5. **Seek mentorship:** Reach out to senior team members or external resources for guidance on handling workload distribution issues.
## Seeking Solutions for Long-Term Success
While it may be challenging to address the cherry-picking behavior in the short term, it’s essential to work towards long-term solutions that promote a healthy work environment. Here are some strategies to consider for ongoing success:
– Advocate for the hiring of a dedicated SD lead to provide structure and oversight within the team.
– Implement regular team meetings to discuss workload distribution, performance metrics, and any concerns or challenges faced by team members.
– Encourage a culture of collaboration and support within the team to foster a sense of camaraderie and shared responsibility.
## Conclusion
Dealing with cherry-picking behavior in the workplace can be frustrating, but by implementing effective communication strategies, setting clear expectations, and seeking long-term solutions, you can create a more equitable and balanced work environment. Remember, advocating for yourself and your workload is essential in ensuring a positive and fulfilling experience in your role at the MSP. Stay proactive, stay positive, and don’t be afraid to speak up for yourself and your team. #WorkplaceEquality #Teamwork #CareerSuccess
By addressing the issue head-on and seeking solutions proactively, you can overcome the challenges posed by cherry-picking behavior and create a more harmonious and productive work environment for yourself and your team.
Either ask what it takes to be SD lead and show initiative, or cherry pick the easy tickets as well. Get your exp and move on.
Seen it my whole career
Complain to leadership (which will likely do nothing) or cherry pick even HARDER
Is this effecting your metrics in any way that would make management look upon you poorly? If not, carry on. Let the chumps take the stupid work so that you have time to work on hard and meaningful issues. The experience is valuable.
Take the harder tickets, and solve them. But make sure your work is easy to audit/see in ticket notes, etc.
When the new lead starts, schedule re-occurring meetings with them where you discuss what you accomplish, any challenges, and what you plan to accomplish.
It will be very clear you’re outperforming the others based on the meetings and when they do reports. If they’re a good lead, they’ll balance the workload, and/or maybe even give you a good raise/promotion.
An alternative option is to take the experience you get from working the hard issues, and then go somewhere else that is a better job. Which tbh might be hard if you’re in a good spot rn.
Reminds me of a developer that I used to work with who rage quit in the middle of a standup because he got penalized for not closing enough tickets. Unlike his colleagues, he tackled the complex ones and the rest of them only worked on the ones that could be solved in an hour.
Learn Linux and move on from MSP hell
This probably won’t work until you get a new lead, but here’s how I took care of this behavior on my team. I have a team not much larger than yours and some of the “old timers” would just grab the easiest tickets then brag about how many they closed that month.
We created a daily rotation called Ticket ~~Bitch~~ Master and for the day, that person monitors the inbound ticket queue and inbound phone calls. If the ticket is super fast and easy, they knock it out fast. If it’s more complicated but not urgent, they assign the ticket to themselves and reply to the requestor that they will touch base with them soon. If it’s complicated and urgent, they escalate to someone else on the team who isn’t the ticket master then get back to monitoring the inbound queue. If they think it’s easy but turns out to be more involved, they either cut the call short and schedule a time to pick it back up w/ the user in the following days, or they do a warm hand off to another tech.
The next 3-4 days when they aren’t the ticket master, they have more uninterrupted time to handle their ticket backlog and work on projects/training. There’s less context switching, so more gets done with fewer unforced errors. Tons of cross training going on, and I’m “bus-proofing” the team by making sure there’s nothing that only one person is capable of fixing. It also seems to make onboarding new team members much faster as they get a lot more quick exposure to the company-specific tech.
This has been working well for a few years now. We have some more minutiae baked into the process regarding unplanned time off and what happens to the rotation in instances like that, but nothing crazy complicated.
Let me tell you a story.
My first IT job was at an MSP, where myself and one other guy were the main points of contact. The other guy hated work, and had been at that place for 3 years, in the same role. He would literally pass pretty much all tickets my way, which I was pretty okay with. I usually find the day goes by faster when I have something to do. He also had an extremely negative attitude towards me, and was very rude and condescending, which I didn’t really understand since I was doing all of his work. I still don’t really understand this.
That MSP was a toxic work environment, I mentioned the rude/condescending attacks by my coworker to my boss with zero action or reply. My irritating coworker left that job to find some part time admin job (as in, office admin, not systems admin), I left shortly after to another job.
Looking at his LinkedIn, it appears he did that same part time job until late last year, where he is now unemployed. Prior to this he has been working in odd technician jobs for the last 15 years. I’m currently making at least double what his salary would have been if he were working full-time at his office admin job, and I only have 3 years of IT experience. I’m not saying this to say I’m hot shit, I’m saying if you have some critical thinking ability and a desire to learn, it’s not actually that hard to advance yourself.
If you want to be at helpdesk tier 1 at that MSP for many years to come, it may be worth trying to make your case to management that you would like some improvements. Again, from my experience, this doesn’t go well, and I don’t think it will work, but I could be overly pessimistic. If you want to advance yourself, either at that company or elsewhere, it may be worth buckling down and just doing the work, you aren’t going to learn anything by doing the stuff you already know. I always found that it helped make the day go by, but to each their own.
I’m sorry for the long rant as well, but I think my past situation is very similar to your current one.
3 years ago we started to use an automated dispatch system that integrates with our ticketing system. It resolved the cherry picking entirely.
The only solution is to round robin auto-assign tickets or have someone designated to disseminate fairly. If the techs are allowed to cherry pick, they will.
Sounds like you have a terrible manager. Generally you can avoid this by doing a round robin where nobody assigns their own tickets.
There’s not much you can do about it but try not to dwell on it. You can’t escape underachievers in IT, it sucks.
You don’t enjoy the more challenging and involved work? Just putting a see the bright side spin on it.
Complain to your manager, if your manager isn’t stupid he will take notice of it. I have seen IT department that has a point of escalation and any specific issue is routed to a specific person. So for example if you have 3 guys in the IT department and you get a ticket involving the macbook then you send it to the macbook expert. If someone completed 7 tickets of password resets but you have only completed 2 involving extensive troubleshooting where you probably ended up recreating a user profile or something just let your manager know about the toxic culture of cherry picking easy tickets.
I see this on a daily basis and it’s frustrating. Especially when a 5 minute password reset ticket carries the same weight as a server down ticket metrics-wise. I reluctantly take the hard tickets.
Without being obnoxious about it, I make sure management see me sees me taking initiative on the harder tickets. Actions speak louder than words.
Goes without saying, but also try and get out of helpdesk.
My company implemented a “get ticket button” in our ticketing system, which techs are to use to be assigned their next piece of work. Since they’re able to track the usage of said button and picking up tickets without said button its intended goal is to curb cherry picking. Of course this doesn’t truly stop cherry picking because we can still view the whole unassigned queue, so it’s pretty easy to still gain the system if one really cared.
Do the same thing they are doing if you can.
SD?
At an MSP, unfortunately the higher ups aren’t going to care you aren’t getting the easy tickets. You’re just going to have to play the game until you either get a system the auto dispatches or a lead that dispatches for you.
How you “deal with it” is you realize that you are the only one actually gaining experience and learning skills that will allow you to remain competitive in the industry. You learn by solving the extremely frustrating, bang your head against the wall problems that make you think through the problem. This is actually a gift, but your perspective is skewed and you’re simply not seeing it for what it is. After some time, folks will request you for the difficult issues by name because they will understand your value and know you can actually get the job done. If you want to be noticed and secure your position in tech, embrace the situation and make it work for you.
Everyone picks the oldest ticket on the board, no matter what.
Routine service tickets get automatically assigned or given out by the manager or lead.
Lots of ticketing systems can be set up to auto allocate tickets to technicians that are logged in. It can be round robin or it can assign to techs with the least amount of open tickets.
I’d talk with your manager about setting it up like that. Show screenshots of your completed tickets verses the others.
So … do you want to be known as the capable person who fixes the tough problems … or the person who whines and fights to get the easy tickets? Your career, not mine – pick your path.
Worked hardware/desktop support with a fellow called Bill, who constantly bragged about his ticket closures each month but they were all simple tickets; replace a toner cartridge, replace a keyboard type tickets. Anytime he had a “real” ticket he’d buddy up with one of the newer techs and have them do the work.
We all cheered when management caught on and let him go.
I use a system that auto dispatches but I get all the tickets for some reason. I usually just handle it myself because I actually enjoy doing the work but if I start getting overwhelmed, I have the clearance to distribute out to other people so I can take care of my back log. Management is pretty cool though so they don’t harass us about holding onto tickets unless they’ve been sitting for a long time with no updates.
Also makes me the go-to guy because I’ve solved so many different types of problems but also I have a really good reputation at my work place for fixing people’s stuff.
Get used to this when you work on a team that there are gonna be slackers. The key here is that other people know that you’re the one killing it.
The harder tickets you work , the better the tech you become.
Honestly, best way we avoided this at my last company was having a dispatcher. She could then prioritize the easy tickets for a newbie, help break them in, or give urgent tickets to the right people who have a clearer schedule. In my case being the highest form of escalation, it helped having dispatch to also reschedule my tickets with clients when a clusterfudge happened so that I could focus on the crisis rather than scheduling.
However, depends on the size of your team whether this would even be doable though of course.
All those easy tickets should be automated, that way they never get those tickets in the first place.
It doesn’t get any better. Your reward for working hard and doing a job is just more work and harder tickets.
This is inevitable in any system that uses metrics. The ones who take the time to work difficult tickets will only be punished for it. Only way to resolve it would be to have a neutral third party triage your queue.
Our team had this issue for a while until we implemented an auto-assign system where every ticket gets auto-assigned until everyone has about an equal amount. Stopped the cherry pickers and promoted all techs to tackle the tougher issues. Definitely helped our team a lot.
Our helpdesk team did that, I took over management and assign them out fairly and to their strengths. Free for all ticket taking just doesn’t work.
Your lead or manager should be responsible for assigning out ALL the tickets.
Don’t look at it negatively, take the difficult ones and skill up. After the difficult ones become easy get a promotion or leave.
If you change your perspective to learning from the harder tickets, you’ll grow faster than your peers. A lot of people see employment as something to get over with to get to the end of the week, but taking the harder tickets will get you knowledge and experience you can leverage in the interview within a few months.
Omfg this sounds like my place. “I get 20 tickets a day done” yeah but they are already done. Then I am getting beat with the most ridiculous tickets in existence.
By getting more difficult tickets you have more opportunities to learn and challenge yourself.
Oh man! Let me tell you that it won’t get resolved and ime it’s favored by MSPs. See MSPs to me is all about who kiss ass to leadership faster and harder. If you’re on the SD or out in the field and you have any ambition to move out; you gotta outkiss the ones above you 100% of the time.
I promise you that the “cherry-picking” you’re seeing is being encouraged by leadership. You wanna validate this? Go ahead and bring it up to management with hard data. Pull your own reports on their ITSM platform. And watch them buckle their logic and sweet talk you with “other oppurtinites”. It’s gonna be more field work and low hanging fruit.
If you’re really itching to “cherry-pick”. Pick a client. Any client. Find their noisest and highest chain of command. Kiss their ass and convince them that only you are capable of touching all their work from now on. Problem solved.