The case against the ticket
Let’s call the ticket what it is: a workaround. It’s a relic from a time when humans were the only means of diagnosing and resolving technical problems. It made sense in a human-centered workflow; document the issue, assign it to a team and wait for resolution. But at scale, tickets reveal themselves as friction points.
They cost time. They slow MTTR. They create queues. They burn out staff. They require interpretation, enrichment, triage and escalation, often before resolution even begins. Worse, they reinforce a culture of reactivity: “Did you create a ticket?” becomes the reflex instead of “Did we fix the root cause?”
From what I’ve seen working with global enterprises across telecom, financial services, manufacturing and the public sector, tickets aren’t just operational overhead — they’re opportunity cost. Every minute spent opening, routing or waiting on a ticket is time that could have been spent solving problems or advancing strategic goals. Employees wait for someone to open a ticket, wait for someone else to pick it up, and wait again for someone to act. It’s not just inefficient; it’s momentum lost across the business.
