Ticket Driven Development

I’m an integrator and standing up a couple of racks for some development purposes for a team.

All the hardware wired and hooked (switches, servers, storage etc.) up and power button pressed. Ready to be configured which is ultimately a small proxmox cluster for VMs and 10 node k8 cluster.

Ticket to network team to get uplink ran to equipment switches, 2 months, finally get network access. (major blocker because nothing could even be configure without network). Finally solved..then the start of configuration

Ticket to get to Identity team access to get App account for LDAP configuration.

Ticket to Identity team to get group for created for LDAP account created.

Ticket to different part of Identity team to get configuration information.

Get told my this other part of Identity team I need a different type account because that’s different and doesn’t have access…start that process

Ticket to get approval for k8 software k3s.

Ticket to then get k3s repositories added to internal network mirror/cache

Ticket to get approval for Nvidia operator software

Ticket to get Nvidia operator software added to internal network mirror/cache

Rinse reset for any software we need.

Ticket to get approval for internal OS images

Find bugs with internal OS image with kickstart file, report with solution internal OS image maintainers don’t want to fix. Forced to implement workaround.

Ticket to get access to Virus scanning tool to implement on proxmox (per instructions as they don’t have an image).

Ticket to get access to logging/inventory scanning tool to implement on proxmox (per insta as they don’t have an image).

Blah blah blah blah. You get the picture….

For the most part this is different teams across IT. I’m an integrator so I work across these teams. I don’t make the rules. I point out the rules to management and how arbitrary they are but I try to follow them as best I can as that’s policy.

Here is the problem…the teams I’m implementing for are NOT part of IT, they pay for everything. They just want to just use the stuff. They don’t understand why it takes so long when it’s literally a ticket for everything and it’s 1-5 days for a ticket to be answered.

They want to “support” and ask me to give them names of the blockers so they can “escalate”. My problem is, it seems they don’t really understand that this is a systemic issue with the processes. It’s not the person on these teams handling these tickets…it’s these equipment owners own counter parts in IT making these processes and it’s just inherently slow. They don’t eat their dog food as a user because it’s the ultimate “mother may I” system. Most techs are good at helping, some love the control and get off on the authority they have but in general it’s all requested by their management.

My problem is that if I go tell these equipment owners which tickets I have open and the issues I am waiting on…they will just go escalate those instances of the problem, solve that issue, claim victory and never bother to look at addressing the root of the problem.

Is there a good tactic for dealing with this type of situation?