When a team decides to “do something about automation”, the first meeting tends to be about tools. Which platform, which scripting language, who’s going to own it. The tickets come up later, if at all.
I think that’s backwards. Your service desk has already written down, in its own messy way, exactly what’s worth automating. Someone just has to read it.
All it takes is an afternoon and a spreadsheet.
Pull ninety days, not a year
A year of tickets sounds more thorough. In practice it drags in last winter’s VPN migration, a printer fleet you’ve since replaced and an Outlook bug that was patched months ago. Ninety days is recent enough to reflect the estate you run today, and long enough to see what repeats.
Export the short description, the full description if you can get it, the category, the resolution notes, and when each ticket was opened and closed. Strip out names and email addresses before the file goes anywhere. You don’t need them for this.
Ignore the categories
This is the step people resist. The category field feels like it should help, and it mostly doesn’t.
Categories get picked from a dropdown by whoever logs the ticket, often in a hurry, sometimes by the employee. “Hardware” covers a dead laptop and a mouse that won’t pair. “Software > Other” is a junk drawer. The same problem lands in three places depending on who picked it up.
Read the descriptions and the resolution notes instead. Group tickets by what the person was experiencing, in their words: “Teams says I’m offline”, “can’t print on the 3rd floor”, “laptop really slow since Monday”. Then check the resolution notes to see whether the same fix closed them. Two tickets with different symptoms and the same fix are one problem.
It’s slow going the first time. After forty or fifty tickets you start recognising them on sight.
Score what’s left
You’ll end up with twenty or thirty problems that keep coming back. For each one, ask four questions:
- How often does it happen? Count the tickets, and assume the real number is higher. Plenty of people hit the problem, restart and never call.
- How much does it hurt? A slow login every morning annoys more people than a broken scanner in one office.
- Is the fix the same every time? If the engineer’s notes say “restarted the spooler” twenty times over, that’s a candidate. If they say “investigated, see email thread”, it isn’t.
- Can you undo it? Clearing a cache is safe. Reimaging a laptop is not something to hand to a machine on day one.
The ones that do well on all four go to the top. Usually that’s somewhere between three and eight, and they’re rarely glamorous: print queues, Teams and Outlook caches, a service that stops after an update, a VPN client that doesn’t reconnect after sleep, a disk that’s nearly full.
Leave some things alone
Some repeat tickets shouldn’t be automated, or not yet:
- Anything where the fix depends on a judgement call (“does this person really need admin rights?”)
- Anything that hits a lot of devices at once and can’t be rolled back
- Problems that are really a broken process. If every new starter’s laptop arrives without the finance app, fix onboarding, not the laptop.
Watch for tickets that are complaints about something IT doesn’t control, too. No automation is going to make a slow SaaS vendor faster.
Start with three
Pick three. Not ten. Switch on fixes for those three, run them on a small group of devices, and watch what happens to the ticket count for those problems over the next few weeks. If it drops, you have a result you can show someone. If it doesn’t, you’ll find out why much faster with three than with thirty.
Then go back to the list and take the next three.
If you’d rather skip the spreadsheet
We do this for teams as a free automation assessment. Send your top call drivers in plain words, or a ticket export, and we map each one against Nanoheal’s library of 1,200+ automations: what’s covered out of the box, what would need building, and the five we’d switch on first. The report comes by email, and the export is deleted after 30 days.
That said, do it yourself at least once. You’ll learn more about your estate from an afternoon with the resolution notes than from most dashboards.