Stop Stacking Dominoes with Your "Nebulous Blob" of a Service Board and Start Hunting the Rogues

Let's talk about that service board.

For most IT Service Providers, it's not a manageable list of tasks. It's instead what I call the "nebulous blob"—a never-ending, shapeless backlog of work that feels impossible to get ahead of.

In a desperate attempt to control this chaos, you probably have a dispatcher playing a frantic, losing game of Tetris, i.e. the "stack-and-run" method.

Your dispatcher tries to assign a tech to every single ticket, believing that if a ticket has a name on it, it magically won't get lost. Then they meticulously line up service calls end-to-end, trying to "fully utilize" every minute of the tech's day. The result? The dispatcher spends all their time trying to restack the dominoes after they inevitably fall.

It's a sure-fire recipe for burnout and inefficiency. As I often say, F#@k All That.

It’s based on a core fallacy: that you can manage people into efficiency. Important safety tip: you can't. You must manage the work instead.

You Don't Need a Dispatcher. You Need a Coordinator.

Here's the deal: The first step to taming the blob is to change your mindset. You don't need a Service Dispatcher. You need a Service Coordinator.

You might think it's a trivial distinction in a job title. But I promise you, it's not.

• A Service Dispatcher dispatches techs to do work. They manage the people.
• A Service Coordinator coordinates the flow of service. They manage the work.

In an Agile Service Delivery model, we want to manage the work, not the techs. We hire smart technicians; we need to let them do what they do best: fix stuff. We let them pull work from the heap—rather than pushing work on them—highest priority to lowest, and trust them to follow the process and workflow.

The Service Coordinator's job changes completely. Instead of stacking dominoes, they have a new, more valuable target. They start hunting "Rogues".

Stop Obsessing Over the Blob. Hunt the “Rogues”.

I know you’re asking: if the Service Coordinator isn't micromanaging the techs' schedules, what are they doing?

Well, they're focusing on the tickets that actually cause damage.

See, that "nebulous blob" is mostly just the regular churn of business. For every ticket you close, a new one opens for another client need. That's normal. Obsessing over the entire blob is a waste of your most valuable resources.

The real poison in your system—the thing that’s killing your metrics and frustrating your clients—is the "Rogues".

A "Rogue" ticket is one of two things:

1. The "Stinky" Ticket: This is the ticket that keeps getting touched, is growing older and older, but no real time is being logged against it. It's stuck, it's rotting on the vine, and nobody is admitting it.
2. The "Immortal" Ticket: This one is also getting older, but it's having more and more time logged against it, and it still won't die. This is the ticket where you've basically paid to fix the same problem six times over, and it's still open.

These Rogues are what blow your most critical metrics to pieces.

Why the Rogues Are Your Real Enemy

When I'm coaching a company, I don't look at the size of their blob first. I look at their metrics. And the Rogues are what destroy them.

• Average Time on Ticket (Throughput): Those "immortal" tickets skyrocket this number. They make it look like your team is slow and inefficient, when in reality, one or two Rogues are skewing the average. This metric dictates your throughput—how many tickets you can actually close per tech in a given time.
• Average Ticket Age (Lead Time): Those "stinky" tickets are an anchor on this metric. This number is, quite simply, how long your customer waits to get their needs addressed.

You can't fix these core metrics by micromanaging the 90% of tickets that are normal. You fix them by relentlessly identifying and eradicating the 10% that are Rogues.

Here’s the Big Takeaway

Stop managing the team. Start managing the work. Let your team do their job. Your Service Coordinator's job is to stop playing with dominoes and start hunting Rogues.

Find them, escalate them, and kill them. That is how you clear the board. And that is how you get to the next level.

Need Help With Hunting Your Rogues?

If you think you need help with your ops, reach out to me; it's what I do.

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