How to prevent your backlog becoming a graveyard of forgotten and forlorn tasks.

8 minute read.

Introduction.

Anyone who has worked in project management or software development knows the sinking feeling of facing an ever-growing backlog of tickets. What starts as a tool for organisation can quickly spiral into a graveyard of half-finished, poorly defined tasks. This is what we call Ticket Death. It's the phenomenon where the ticketing system becomes cluttered with incomplete or empty tickets, slowing down teams and losing track important issues in the chaos and noise.

But Ticket Death doesn’t just waste time…

It risks something far more damaging: the loss of valuable knowledge.

As tickets lie unactioned and without content, the context behind them fades, especially if the author leaves the team or company. Key insights can be lost for good.

In this article, we’ll define Ticket Death, explore its impact on productivity and knowledge retention, and share strategies to avoid it, including our practical approach called the 15-minute rule.

Defining Ticket Death.

Ticket Death refers to the slow demise of a project management system under the weight of irrelevant, incomplete, or forgotten tickets.

Instead of serving its purpose, that purpose being tracking and prioritising tasks, the system becomes clogged with tickets that are often blank or bereft of content, poorly written, lacking a sense of purpose, or abandoned altogether. This graveyard of tickets turns what should be a helpful tool into a burden that hampers productivity.

The worst part? Tickets without any content could point to major problems affecting the business. These aren’t just forgotten tasks; they’re potentially critical issues that get lost because no one knows the context anymore. The original author may have moved on to another team or left the company, and with them, the knowledge behind those tickets vanishes into the ether. This loss of knowledge can have a lasting negative impact on the business.

What’s the problem?

Ticket Death creates several issues, not just for workflow, but for the broader organisation. While the need for agility and speed can be crucial, the excitement of documenting every idea often leads to a flood of incomplete tickets as our team mates and managers ‘just leave it there as a note, so they can get back to it later’.

The backlog fills with half-formed tasks, many of which are missing crucial information. Over time, this flood of incomplete tasks creates chaos, as the team wastes valuable time trying to untangle a mess of old tickets, many of which have lost their context because projects have changes, the company has pursued a different strategy, or the person who created the ticket is no longer around - the author may have moved on to another project or left the company all together. In this situation, even if the tickets reference important problems, the lack of details makes it nearly impossible to pick up where the original author left off.

Let’s break down the key challenges:

Unclear ownership: This isn’t just about who is responsible for the ticket or who is expected to deliver a solution to the issue, it’s also about who has ownership of the ticket management process. If there is no clear leadership or direction from someone actively managing the issues and grooming the backlog then it is more likely that the list of tasks will becoming increasingly chaotic over time. You need someone to police and manage this system to prevent problematic incomplete issues from accumulating.

Inefficiency: Teams waste time trying to sift through a cluttered backlog of tickets. It becomes difficult to prioritise real work when there is an ocean of unclear or irrelevant entries. The extra time required to manage the backlog means less time focused on productive tasks.

Reduced Productivity: As the backlog grows, team members are constantly interrupted by incomplete or vague tickets. Instead of focusing on high-priority tasks, they’re forced to clarify or resolve low-priority or ambiguous ones, leading to slower overall progress.

Poor Communication: When tickets are vague or missing crucial information, communication breaks down. Developers and team members must spend time hunting for details or clarifying tasks with the original author, which slows down the entire workflow.

Knowledge Loss: Perhaps the most serious issue with Ticket Death is the potential loss of knowledge. If tickets contain little or no content and remain unactioned, the insight behind them can vanish when the original author moves on. Once lost, this knowledge can’t be recovered, leaving the team to figure out critical problems from scratch, or worse, reverse engineer a problem.

Project Delays: A cluttered backlog leads to project delays as teams struggle to locate and prioritise important tasks. The sheer volume of incomplete tickets can obscure the real work, making it harder to meet deadlines. Project delays cost both time and money, and the added bonus is that it delays and pushes back future projects too.

Morale Impact: Teams that are faced with a backlog of forgotten or irrelevant tickets often feel overwhelmed. The constant flood of tasks makes it difficult to focus on meaningful work, leading to frustration, burnout, and lower morale.

Task Paralysis: When the backlog is overflowing with tickets, team members can become overwhelmed by the sheer volume of tasks, leading to this phenomenon. Faced with too many choices and unclear priorities, your team may struggle to determine where to focus their efforts, slowing down progress as they hesitate to take action or prioritise effectively.

Ineffective backlog management techniques to avoid.

Many managers and teams try to address Ticket Death with quick fixes, but these often do more harm than good. I’ve seen a lot of chat about this kind of thing on LinkedIn and some of the ‘solutions’ are an horror show. Here are some ineffective approaches to avoid:

Batching and Deleting Tickets: Simply deleting old or unclear tickets without proper review can cause teams to lose important insights. While it might clean up the backlog temporarily, it also risks discarding potentially valuable information.

Superficial Clean-ups: A superficial clean-up, where tickets are removed based on age or perceived relevance, might make the backlog look better on the surface, but it doesn’t solve the underlying issue of poor ticket management. Without addressing the root cause, the problem will return.

Ignoring Detailed Documentation: Rushing to close tickets without focusing on detailed documentation can lead to recurring issues. Teams that don’t take the time to thoroughly document tasks or problems are doomed to revisit the same problems again and again.

Relying on Automated Bulk Actions: Automation can help, but it shouldn’t be relied on exclusively. Bulk closing or merging tickets based on automated systems often leads to important tickets being lost or overlooked, as machines can’t assess the true value of each entry.

Effective Solutions for Ticket Death.

To avoid the pitfalls of Ticket Death, teams must implement structured, long-term solutions that focus on clarity, communication, and regular management. Here are some effective strategies:

Clear Ticket Guidelines

One of the most effective ways to avoid Ticket Death is by establishing clear ticket guidelines. This ensures that all tickets meet a standard level of detail and relevance, reducing the chances of incomplete or unactioned tasks cluttering the backlog. The key to these guidelines is ensuring clarity around who is responsible and accountable for each workflow.

Every ticket should include (at a bare minimum):

• A clear problem statement.

• Detailed context and the expected outcome.

• The priority level (this should be based on guidelines for assessing impact, urgency and priority).

• Assignment to the responsible person or team.

• Indication of who needs to review the task / will receive notification of the work product.

Moreover, it’s crucial to define who is allowed to add tickets to specific boards or workflows. Not everyone in the company should have free rein to flood the backlog with tickets. Defining responsibility and accountability is essential in managing this process effectively. Clear communication with teams about who is accountable for various tasks, and how this accountability is managed, ensures that only necessary and well-formed tickets make it to the backlog.

Make sure everyone in the team knows who is responsible for managing or grooming the backlog, how tickets are assigned, and the rituals that need to be followed.

The 15-Minute Rule

As part of your clear ticket guidelines, consider implementing the 15-minute rule.

If a team member cannot spend at least 15 minutes defining the problem and outlining why it matters, the ticket shouldn’t be created. This ensures that only meaningful, well-thought-out issues make it into the system and helps reduce the number of vague, incomplete tickets that can lead to Ticket Death.

The speed of this process can be significantly increased through templates, automation, or even simple tools to create form submissions and generate a ticket.

Regular Backlog Reviews

Conducting regular reviews of the backlog helps keep it manageable. Old, incomplete, or irrelevant tickets should either be updated with proper information or removed. This prevents the backlog from becoming a graveyard and helps keep it focused on actionable tasks.

Make sure everyone knows who is accountable for which backlog. For more on accountability and responsibility, check out Jan’s previous article on RACI Matrices: https://braw-consulting.com/insights/empowering-teams-raci

Training and Awareness

Training sessions on effective ticket creation and management can help teams avoid Ticket Death. Ensuring everyone understands the importance of detail and context in tickets will improve the quality of entries and reduce the amount of time spent chasing down information later.

Regular refreshers and briefings are good, and it can be incorporated into retrospective rituals in terms of identifying issues with workflows and processes, and refining or iterating on the implemented solution.

Use of Templates

Using standardised templates for ticket creation ensures consistency. Templates prompt team members to include all necessary information, reducing the chances of incomplete or vague tickets cluttering the system.

Prioritisation Systems

Prioritising tickets is crucial for managing an active backlog. By establishing clear prioritisation rules, teams can focus on high-impact tasks first, preventing low-priority items from overwhelming the system.

Automation Tools

Automation can help with ticket management by categorising, assigning, or flagging tickets based on their status. However, it’s important to combine automation with human oversight to avoid overlooking important issues that may require more nuanced attention.

Conclusion.

Ticket Death is more than just a backlog problem, it’s also a productivity problem, and a knowledge loss problem. When tickets are not actioned, left for a long period of time in the backlog, or remain incomplete, then the insights behind them can disappear, especially if the author moves on or forgets the context. This phenomenon not only leads to inefficiency and delays but also risks losing valuable knowledge that could be vital to the business.

Inefficiency and delays cost time and money and negatively affect profit margins.

By implementing clear ticket guidelines, defining responsibility and accountability, conducting regular backlog reviews, and adopting strategies like the "15-minute rule," teams can avoid suffering the consequences of Ticket Death and maintain a more efficient, manageable workflow. The goal is to ensure that the ticketing system remains a helpful tool, not a graveyard for forgotten tasks and lost knowledge.

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