**What Happens When Everyone Has ‘Their Person’ in IT**
A colleague walks past the help desk. Past three IT staff members. Straight to one person they know. The request is simple—a vendor needing access via an Active Directory account. It could be resolved through the standard ticketing system in minutes. But the path chosen bypasses every established intake process.
This isn’t a fictional scenario. In many IT organizations, this pattern plays out daily. On the surface, it seems efficient. One familiar contact, one quick resolution. But the operational implications run deeper than most organizations acknowledge.
**The Visibility Gap**
When support requests never enter the ticketing system, they become invisible. No record exists. No pattern is tracked. No resource allocation data reflects the actual work being done. Over months, this creates a significant operational blind spot—leadership sees one workload distribution, while the reality on the ground looks entirely different.
This matters particularly during resource planning. If a meaningful portion of a team’s actual support work lives outside the ticketing system, headcount decisions, tooling investments, and process improvements are all being made on incomplete data.
**The Burden Imbalance**
Informal support channels tend to concentrate workload unevenly. Specific individuals—often the most approachable or the longest-tenured—absorb a disproportionate share of requests that should flow through balanced intake mechanisms. The team lead might work remotely while one person in the office becomes the default catch-all. The operational burden compounds quietly.
Over time, this creates morale issues that are difficult to diagnose because the data doesn’t exist to explain them.
**Why Process Bypass Persists**
In many cases, this isn’t about rudeness or lack of awareness. The colleague in question often knows the rest of the team—has worked alongside them for years. The bypass happens because informal channels feel faster, more personal, and more reliable than formal ones.
This is worth investigating. When employees consistently prefer informal channels, it often signals something about the formal process: perhaps ticket response times lag, perhaps the help desk feels like a black hole, or perhaps routing logic creates unnecessary friction. The bypass is a symptom, not the root cause.
**What This Means for Operations Leaders**
For CIOs, IT directors, and operations managers, the takeaway isn’t simply to enforce ticketing discipline. It’s to understand why the informal patterns exist in the first place.
A few practical considerations:
– Audit the gap between ticketed work and actual work through periodic workload visibility exercises
– Examine whether formal intake processes are genuinely efficient or whether they’ve accumulated unnecessary friction over time
– Recognize that familiarity-based support patterns often indicate trust deficits in established channels
– Design processes that preserve the human element while maintaining operational visibility
The goal isn’t to eliminate informal collaboration. It’s to ensure that operational decisions are made with real data, that workload distributes sustainably, and that process design reflects how people actually work—not just how the org chart imagines they should.
When someone walks past the help desk to find their person, they’re not just making a request. They’re providing operational feedback. The question is whether the organization is listening.
