C
Clay Hartley
Summary.
Add a ticket property called "Effort" to Thread. It would estimate how hard a ticket is to resolve, similar to story points in Jira or Linear. PSAs don't offer this today.
Problem.
Managers judge techs mostly by tickets closed and smile-backs, and ticket count ignores difficulty. A tech who closes five hard tickets looks worse on the board than one who closes ten easy ones. Clay at Afinety manages a 12-person team. He says techs complain about this, and his year-end reviews come down largely to gut feel.
What Clay asked for.
An effort value on each ticket, even a subjective one, as "an added variable to look at." He compared it to sentiment scoring, which isn't perfect but is still a useful signal. He called it "a great idea" and said he'd be interested.
Possible signals.
  • Time spent on the ticket. Clay warned this alone is unreliable, because some techs document poorly and time open isn't time worked.
  • How complex the issue is, including cross-platform dependencies and how many systems it touches.
  • A point-style scale, possibly with Thread's AI estimating it from the ticket's contents.
Where it could be used.
  • Manager reporting and performance reviews, to weight tickets closed by difficulty.
  • Dispatch load balancing, which today counts only active tickets. Effort would let it weight tickets differently.
Open questions.
  • Is effort set by hand, estimated by AI, or both?
  • What scale should it use?
  • How should it account for a tech's experience? Clay pointed out that effort depends on who works the ticket.
Created by Griffin Steinman
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