The Consistency Killer: The Chaos of the Rogue Technician
Oct 28, 2025You hired smart, well-meaning technicians to solve problems. And they do. But if your IT service is built on the genius of individual techs instead of a unified, engineered plan, your company is stuck maintaining instead of producing predictable, repeatable results.
This internal misalignment—where every ticket is handled differently—is the single biggest enemy of scalability and repeatability in your IT business. Stop accepting inconsistent workarounds! It's time to replace individual effort with a unified, repeatable system.
The Problem of Good Intentions: When Personal Solutions Become Process Defects
Your techs are problem-solvers; it’s in their DNA. They see a fire, they put it out. They instinctively create a workaround to resolve a complex issue for a client. This is a great trait in a crisis, but it is the antithesis of a scalable business machine.
When you don't provide a clear blueprint for service delivery, your well-meaning technicians are forced to improvise. What you end up with is a system where:
- Custom is King: Every technician develops their own preferred methods, their own interpretation of statuses in the PSA, and their own shortcuts. Tribal knowledge replaces documented processes.
- Inconsistent Results: A simple repair on Client A’s network looks completely different from the same repair on Client B’s network because Tech 1 and Tech 2 used different approaches. This inconsistency is a cancer on your customer experience and your internal efficiency.
- Wasted Training Time: Onboarding a new team member takes twice as long because there is no single source of truth—only a collection of personal preferences they have to muddle through before finding, or creating, their own method.
A business is a machine that is designed to be tuned. But right now, your machine has custom-made parts that only the technician who created them knows how to operate. You can’t scale that.
Engineer Success with the Run Guide Blueprint
The only way to move past this chaos is by establishing an authoritative, pragmatic process. By this, I mean you need a Run Guide.
Think of your Run Guide as the blueprint and the compass for your service delivery team. It removes the need for individual guesswork and replaces it with disciplined execution. It’s what transforms a collection of high-potential individuals into a cohesive, highly functional system.
The first step to repeatable success is to immediately lock down the foundation of your service delivery:
- Establish the Flow: Your tickets must move through the system in a particular sequence. Define the statuses that matter: New, In Progress, Waiting On, Closed. Document the purpose of each.
- Set the Priorities: You must set clear standards for P1, P2, P3, P4. If every ticket is a priority, then you have no strategy for triage. Every tech must use the same definitions and understand the required response time.
- Define Your Swim Lanes: Clearly define the roles and responsibilities for your Tier 1, Tier 2, and Tier 3 techs. A Tier 1 tech should have blinders on, focused only on their designated ticket types. This prevents the "rogue" behavior of jumping into complex issues that fall outside of their established scope of work.
- Mandate the Non-Negotiables – You must enforce these standards for ticket handling:
- One Issue, One Ticket.
- All Work is Done Against a Ticket.
- Work and Track Time in Real-Time.
(Note: These are but a few of what I call, “The 10 Golden Rules of PSA.”)
The Discipline of the Daily Workflow
At the end of the day, success comes down to discipline and execution. You must hold your team accountable to a single, repeatable routine for every technician, every single day:
- Morning Check. Check voicemail and email.
- Scheduled? If yes, have your gear ready and be there on time. That is non-negotiable professional execution.
- Unscheduled? Go to your assigned service board (your Swim Lane). Work tickets from Highest Priority to Lowest Priority, and within each priority, go from Oldest Ticket to Newest Ticket.
It's that simple.
If you implement just this much—if you enforce a unified process for how a ticket lives and dies in your system—you will immediately drive down chaotic waste and boost your team’s throughput. This foundational step is how you begin building the next level for your service delivery.
Final Thoughts
Stop letting your service be dictated by the heroic, yet inconsistent, actions of the individual. Give your team a blueprint and demand disciplined execution. That is how you build an IT business that is structured, scalable, and truly profitable.
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Ready to Engineer Your Process?
You have the will to change, but sometimes the distance between a roadmap and disciplined reality is tough to cross alone. If you want a proven partner to help you execute the blueprint, reach out to me and let's talk about the next level for your service delivery.
Image by NomadSoul1 | Envato

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