Maintain your tickets
Tickets are the bread and butter of the IT support and service management world. Used properly they are an effective way to track progress on any particular issue, whether that be the approval of a change request, the resolution of an incident, or the root cause analysis of a problem. In this piece I'll assume you have a fairly modern ticketing system with the features you'd expect.
Their mix of strict form fields and freehand notes makes them a versatile method of collating essential information.
They can be passed between teams and can be searched and viewed by anyone days, weeks, months, and sometimes years in the future - unlike emails, which can only be searched by those on the email trail.
When I'm investigating something, particularly progress on longer lived tickets, it gives me great pleasure to find tickets them with all the information I need. There's no need for me to bug anyone to get an update or find out what actually happened - most of which will be long forgotten. Conversely, tickets that haven't been kept up-to-date make me sad. I'm sure the ticket owner would have a much easier life if they gave themselves an at-a-glance reminder of just how far (or not) they'd forged ahead with an issue. For want of a few minutes providing a brief update or attaching a relevant piece of information they could be saving themselves a lot of effort when they next pick up the ticket.
Good ticket maintenance is also essential for short-lived tickets, particularly requests and simple incidents. Resolution descriptions like "Fixed" or "Resolved" mean nothing to anyone but you - and if anyone asks you in one months time, you won't remember how you fixed it. If you're following a standard procedure to resolve a ticket, say so.
Good maintenance of tickets will also prevent the creation of enemies when you're off sick and a customer asks one of your team mates for an update.
So if you're owning a ticket make sure you own it physically (update the ticket to show you're the owner) and metaphorically (make the ticket work for you, your team, and the customer).
Oh, and one final request - don't take ownership of a difficult ticket and let it sit in your queue for days, weeks, months waiting for the headspace to tackle it. Leave it in your team's queue until you're actually going to start work on it.
In summary: update the ticket title to accurately reflect the actual issue (you often don't know when the ticket is first raised); keep writing notes or updates to let others know how you're progressing; accompany any attachments with a note describing where it came from and what it shows; and link any Configuration Items affected by the issue.
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