When Does a Ticket Become a Project?

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

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Topics: CRM, Information Technology, Organizational Project Management, Service Management, Stakeholder Management

IT service management using any of the popular frameworks is much more than just managing operational environments and controlling change. The models all talk in some way about delivering value to client groups and they advocate an integrated approach to everything from strategy through design and implementation to support and lifecycle management.

In many organizations, the strategy to implementation piece is closely aligned with project management practices—planning projects and producing or supporting business cases, scheduling work, planning implementations, etc. However, when an IT system moves into an operational environment, that project integration virtually disappears—and that’s what I want to consider in this article.

On the face of it, there is no need for alignment with projects at this point in the technology lifecycle—by definition, operations is not a project. Therefore, until a new release, upgrade or infrastructure move is required, there is no project work to conduct.

In reality, that’s not the case—incident and problem management contains many similarities with projects. When a user experiences a problem and opens a service ticket or similar incident record, the problem is analyzed by a skilled IT resource and the root cause is identified. Assuming it is a legitimate problem that needs to be resolved, alternative …

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