The tickets you never see
Every managed IT provider reports on tickets closed. Almost none report on the number that matters more - the ones that were prevented from ever being raised.
Open any managed services report and you will find the same chart: tickets received, tickets closed, average resolution time, a satisfaction score. It looks like accountability. It is actually a measure of how much went wrong, presented as a measure of how well it was handled.
The incentive problem
A provider paid per ticket has no reason to reduce tickets. A provider paid a flat monthly fee has every reason to - and that difference shows up in where the engineering effort goes. One invests in faster closure, the other in root cause.
We are not claiming virtue here. It is simply what the pricing model rewards, and you should ask any prospective provider which model they are on before you ask anything else.
What preventable actually means
When we take on an estate, we categorise the first ninety days of tickets by whether the underlying cause was addressable. The proportion is consistently higher than clients expect - typically between half and two-thirds. The usual suspects:
- Storage and capacity - disks filling on a predictable curve that nobody was plotting.
- Certificates and expiry - entirely calendar-driven, and entirely preventable.
- Patch-related breakage - avoidable with a ring-based rollout rather than a single deployment.
- Repeat user issues - the same fifteen people asking the same question because a configuration default is wrong.
- Silent backup failures - discovered at restore time, which is the worst time.
The number to ask for
Ask your provider for tickets per user per month, plotted over twelve months. Not closure rate. Not satisfaction. If that line is flat, the estate is not improving - it is being maintained at whatever level of dysfunction it arrived with.
A healthy engagement shows a visible decline over the first two quarters as preventable causes get closed out, then a flattening at a genuinely lower level. If it never falls, something is wrong with either the work or the incentives behind it.
What this does not mean
Zero tickets is not the goal and is not achievable. People will always need help, and a team that never contacts IT is usually a team that has quietly given up and built workarounds. The goal is that the tickets which remain are requests rather than failures.