One of the most notorious things in tech support is being asked to categorise issues/work. I regularly deal with incident tickets and often choose “close enough” categorisations because the ticket system was designed or configured by someone who has no clue how our things break.
Getting “data” out of such systems is second only to time recording — of which I have long said that if anyone can successfully explain time recording in a technical discipline they will simultaneously have invented time travel — in terms of getting garbage out from the garbage in. I don’t doubt you have your data.
We never kick stuff down the road in my team. Ever. This is how we reduced our after hours call out burden from a dozen or more calls in an average week to a zero week not being unusual. That’s not just zero problems, it’s zero calls. Nothing even pretending to be a problem. Our record is 10 straight days with not even an external event issue.
Granted, we don’t usually end up dealing with end users, rather internal systems and users, but when our team was 10 people 10 years ago and as of this year it’s only 3, we are very proud of our dedication to “not let it break the same way twice.” And thankful, now that we can’t even have a 3 week end-of-year shutdown without all of us having to do a week on call.
Not bad for a “legacy” system that was first implemented in 1989 and has been subject to poor decision making ever since.