Abstract: What do you do when your API is "open a ticket"?

At a past employer, [PRESENTER] found himself responsible for a process that, when finally mapped, involved 12 teams, 30 steps, and 27 hand-offs between teams. Most teams only saw their own "box". The process took 6+ weeks to complete and there were usually 3-4 instances of the process active at any given time (about 24 executions of the process each year).

The "API" for most of the steps was to open a ticket with that team, making a request and waiting for the request to complete. A project manager literally spent hours each day watching which tickets were getting attention and pushing the process along.

The team: 1. Mapped the entire process. It took 3+ months to just find out there were 30 steps and 27 handoffs. 2. Held "empathy" meetings with each team to help them see how they fit into the process, brainstorm optimizations, and enroll the teams in process improvements. 3. Wrote a robot that watched the tickets automatically. Eventually it could see that one ticket was complete and open the next tickets (that had been blocked) automatically. It included a status dashboard and generated stats about lead time and SLA compliance.

Sadly [PRESENTER] left the company without taking any screen caps and the system hasn't been open sourced, so you'll have to believe me and my hand-drawn slides :-) However, I'll gladly discuss details after the Ignite talks are over if anyone would like to write a clone.

Speaker: Tom Limoncelli

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