You probably recognize them or maybe even are already formulating them: good intentions to make the new year even more wonderful. Not only privately, but also at work I come across it more and more often. Just finish a few things quickly, so that you start the new year clean. At ANVA, this is certainly true.
Any other work we throw into the group first. Together we discuss whether we want to pay attention to that at this time. And what turns out? It's working! For a moment we were afraid that the number of old tickets would decrease, but the total amount would increase. Fortunately, nothing was further from the truth; the total number of tickets also decreased significantly. Whereas the total number of open tickets had long been above 210, this has now been reduced to about 170 to 180 open tickets. A major catch-up has also been made in the number of tickets that were out of time. We had set ourselves the goal of being under 20 by the end of November and under 5 by the end of December, so we have surpassed ourselves!
So did it only succeed with the right focus? Not entirely. We agreed on ground rules together and paid attention to them twice a day. We filled a door in the department with the tickets, so they were on display all day. For every ticket that was solved, colleagues received a marble. The three colleagues with the most marbles received a December scratch calendar on December 1. We will see if there will be a new top three at the end of December that we can give a nice prize to.
So with a little competition among ourselves, focus and, above all, clear rules of the game, we succeeded! It is nice to see that despite the competition there has been more cooperation than in the past year. Because of corona we see each other much less and are more and more occupied with our own work. With focus on only your own reports, we could never get below 20. We realized that all too well. We really had to work together. Often five of us were working on a ticket and still managed to solve it. As chapter leader, I am extremely proud of the result and happy with the team spirit that has been strengthened.
That positive energy and clean up is contagious has also been proven. Of course I did a good job of advertising our action within ANVA. With messages on our intranet, posters in the hallway and conversations with colleagues from other departments, everyone now knows what we are doing. Soon the consultants came up with a list of clients where they often sit. "If they also have red tickets then maybe we can pick them up." Gladly, was my response!
The developers also have many old tickets hanging around waiting for a software change. With all the product owners, we walked through their backlog and made choices. Some things finally got attention and from some reports we decided that we are not going to pick it up. That too is cleaning up. We'd rather make an honest assessment that we're not picking it up now than have a report still open in two years.
A total of 292 red tickets were still open at the service desk and development teams on November 1. On December 1, there were still 175 - almost half of them! That's what I call cleaning up. But ... we're not stopping yet. This year has 10 more days. Christmas and New Year's fall on the weekend this time, which makes for several more full work weeks. We definitely want to drop the number of open tickets by a lot on the last days of this year.
And then? Then we will evaluate. Something that's definitely going to stay in there are some ground rules and dwelling on them during our day start. For example:
In addition, we keep asking each other if someone else needs help, both in the morning at daybreak and again in the afternoon via Teams. That way you have two moments a day when everyone is available to think along. Combined with more attention to transferring knowledge, this is going to provide us with enough challenges for the first quarter of next year!
