A well-organized ticket system not only ensures order in daily work, but also fundamentally changes how tasks are planned, processed and tracked. It creates transparency, enables efficient collaboration without waiting times and becomes a valuable source of knowledge in the long term.

We developed the ticket system in Leadtime with the aim of making working with tickets as effortless and motivating as possible. Because we know that: The step towards a consistent use of tickets can mean an enormous gain in efficiency for a company. That's why we not only paid attention to a clear structure, but also integrated modern tools - such as an intuitive editor and AI-supported ticket creation aids that make the process much easier.

Three key aspects make a ticket system particularly valuable:

In the following, these three points are examined in more detail and their specific advantages for everyday work are highlighted.

Digital service companies face some particular challenges when it comes to managing their work: Unlike in production or retail, for example, where results are visible, tangible and countable, work in digital service companies takes place in a more abstract environment: Here, professionals work predominantly with their knowledge and creative skills - be it in software development, digital marketing or IT consulting.

The results of their work are often not immediately visible: a developer working on a software solution does not produce any visible "components", but rather code that is initially available in the form of numbers and symbols that are difficult for outsiders and even management to understand. This also applies to a marketing expert who designs campaigns or an IT consultant who optimizes systems.

The work therefore largely takes place in the minds of those involved; and this leads to specific challenges for project management. Because without a clear view of the actual progress of individual tasks and milestones, managers can often only guess how close the project is to completion.

It becomes even more complex when several projects have to be handled in parallel - which is almost always the case in the digital services industry. Each project consists of countless individual tasks that are carried out by different specialists. If these tasks are not clearly structured and made transparent, chaos ensues. Projects quickly lose focus and it becomes almost impossible to meet deadlines and budgets.

For this reason, service companies should structure their entire work process digitally wherever possible and thus make it transparent. One of the most effective ways to do this is to introduce a ticket-based workflow.

Ticket systems break projects down into small, manageable tasks - so-called "tickets" - which can then be assigned to individual employees and provided with priorities, deadlines and status. This creates a kind of digital "shop window" through which managers and team members can keep an eye on the status of things at all times.

A ticket system works as follows: Each ticket represents a specific task or work step that needs to be completed within a project. A ticket usually contains detailed information about the task, such as a description of the work required, the employee responsible, a deadline and the current status (e.g. "New", "In progress", "Completed"). Tickets can also be divided into different categories to better organize them according to the type of work or project.

The big advantage of such a system is transparency. Both managers and employees have access to the status of each individual ticket at all times. This makes it easy to see who is working on which tasks, which tickets have already been completed and which are still outstanding. Management gets a clear overview of which tasks may be behind schedule and whether deadlines or budgets are at risk. At the same time, employees can better prioritize their own work and know exactly which tasks they need to tackle next.

Another key advantage of ticket systems is their flexibility. Tickets can be updated or created at any time during a project to take account of changing requirements or new information. Team collaboration is also improved through transparency: team members can support each other in solving problems because everyone knows what everyone else is working on.

Especially in start-ups and other organizations with flat hierarchies, a working style is often established that is characterized by continuous communication via team messengers such as "MS Teams" or "Slack". Such messaging systems make it possible to open a direct conversation with one or more team colleagues quickly and effortlessly. This form of real-time collaboration at least feels very spontaneous and "agile": You simply open a channel and start writing, without having to worry about structure or form.

In a corporate culture like this, which is strongly defined by direct communication, it can be a challenge at first to gain acceptance for a ticket system. In direct comparison, it naturally feels somewhat cumbersome and bureaucratic when a ticket suddenly has to be created for every process. To allay these concerns, it is important for management to educate the team about the potential productivity disadvantages that can result from communicating exclusively via team chats.

First of all, excessive chatting almost inevitably leads to constant interruptions and therefore fragmentation of working time. Distractions are particularly problematic for developers: they disrupt the flow of work and make it difficult to concentrate on complex tasks.

More importantly, however, direct collaboration in real time leads to constant waiting times and therefore inefficiency. The following example illustrates the problem:

The diagram shows the progress of a single customer inquiry, which is processed here on the basis of telephone and messenger.

As we can see, there are always waiting times in the course of this collaboration: Sometimes the developer waits for information from their manager, sometimes the manager waits for the developer to have completed their work. In principle, this results in unlimited idle time, especially for queries; after all, everything depends on an external factor, namely how quickly the required information can be obtained from the customer - and if the customer is not in the office, perhaps even on vacation, everything comes to a standstill.

Waiting times are an obvious waste of capacity. However, they can be avoided if both the developer and the customer advisor have a whole stock of actionable tasks that can be accessed during waiting times.

Working in a project-driven digital service company is like a constant flow of facts, decisions and details. Every day, countless tasks are processed, problems solved and changes made - often in parallel in different projects.

Without a central record of all processes, it quickly becomes extremely difficult to understand what was decided or completed when and for what reason. Information gets lost in emails, meetings or chat histories, and important details disappear in the day-to-day business.

In most cases, however, you have to return to a topic sooner or later - be it to question a decision, inform a customer or continue a task. Without a structured system, the tedious research work begins:

If there is no central source of information, employees have no choice but to search through old emails, ask colleagues or fight their way through scattered notes - a time-consuming process that is not only inefficient but also prone to errors.

A well-maintained ticket system, on the other hand, makes all this information accessible with just a few clicks. Every task, every discussion and every decision is documented and can be found again in seconds using the search function. This turns the system into a knowledge database that not only facilitates ongoing operations, but also provides a valuable wealth of experience for future projects.

We have consistently implemented this principle with Leadtime:

Anyone who has experienced how quickly lost information can be retrieved with a good ticket system will never want to do without it again.

For all these reasons, work completion in Leadtime is based on tickets. Every company activity is organized and controlled via tickets - referred to as "tasks" in Leadtime. This does not only apply to customer-specific projects: All internal company activities such as accounting, marketing and sales are also mapped via projects and tickets. This allows employees to seamlessly book their working hours to tasks.

This is the only way to provide management with real-time information about who is working on which tasks and how much time has already been invested. This transparency allows precise monitoring of project progress and helps to identify potential delays or overloads at an early stage.

And almost as a side effect, comprehensive documentation of all company activities is created, which can be used to track who has solved which issue and how, even years later. This knowledge can be reused for future projects or similar tasks, which increases efficiency and prevents errors. This is not only of great benefit for day-to-day business, but also for the long-term planning and optimization of processes and projects.

For maximum productivity, we also recommend the following tactics:

Although customers often prefer seemingly "less complicated" communication channels such as telephone or e-mail, it pays to be persuasive: if the customer works directly in the ticket system, they gain a better overview of the tasks that are currently open. This means that they respond more quickly to queries, accept tickets more quickly and therefore benefit more quickly from the services provided - an advantage for both sides.

Ideally, all participants should be able to use a set of rules to determine which task they should work on next in case of doubt. We recommend the introduction of "priority rules", such as the first-in-first-out principle and a general prioritization of work that has already been started over new work. Queries should be given particularly high priority: The quicker a query is answered, the faster the ticket being processed can be completed and removed from the process.

As the example shows, queries can delay the completion of a ticket and increase the amount of work-in-progress in the system. If queries are to be avoided, the content of the task must be of high quality, i.e. complete and clearly formulated. You should therefore develop quality standards for your tickets with your team. In any case, you can also use AI to reformat your tickets into clearly formulated task descriptions.

Even when tickets are used consistently, there are situations in which a short, direct query in the team chat or a quick exchange is more effective than a time-delayed back and forth in the ticket. Nevertheless, your team should have a conscious understanding of the costs of interruptions.

Every unplanned interruption pulls the colleague concerned out of their current workflow. It takes time and mental energy to concentrate fully on a complex task again after an interruption. This can have a significant impact on productivity, especially for specialists such as developers who have to immerse themselves deeply in solving a problem.

Therefore, if an issue requires a direct conversation, this should also be planned. Arrange a short appointment to discuss the topic in a targeted manner - ideally with an associated ticket so that the results of the conversation are documented and remain comprehensible for all parties involved. This allows you to combine the advantages of asynchronous and synchronous collaboration without jeopardizing the focus and efficiency of your team.