The portal was good work. A catalogue of the things people asked us for constantly, each one wired to a pipeline that provisioned the thing without a human in the middle. Six months after launch it was handling about twelve percent of requests. Everything else still arrived as a ticket or, more often, as a message to somebody's direct chat.
Our first explanation was that people did not know it existed, so we ran an awareness campaign, which achieved nothing measurable. The second explanation was that the interface was awkward, so we improved it, which achieved slightly less than nothing. The third explanation came from actually reading six months of tickets and sorting them by volume, which is what we should have done before writing a line of it.
The catalogue automated the requests that were already cheap. A standard virtual machine, a group membership, a certificate: those were easy to build precisely because they carried no judgement. The high-volume requests were the ones with a decision inside them. Access to something for a reason we would have to evaluate. A machine larger than any standard size, with a justification. The same setup as another team has, whatever that turns out to be. None of those fitted a form, so people went where the judgement lived, which was a person.
There was a second, blunter reason. The portal replied with submitted successfully and nothing else. A message to the team got a human who said give me twenty minutes. When the automated path is slower and less informative than asking, no policy about correct channels will win, and pretending otherwise just moves the work into places you cannot see or measure.
We rebuilt it around what the ticket data said, not around what was easy to script. Every item shows progress and an expected time. There is a deliberate route for anything not in the catalogue that reaches a human without making the requester feel they have done something wrong, and those requests are the backlog for what we automate next.
Self service does not fail because people prefer bureaucracy. It fails when the ticket is still the fastest way to get the thing.
– Serguey Shinder
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