Canadian University Reduced Ticket Completion Time By 33% With Kure
Project Summary
The problem: A Canadian university faced a growing service ticket queue that made it difficult to prioritize critical work, contributing to longer completion times and reduced efficiency.
Using Kure, the university created a more structured approach to prioritizing and managing tickets, reducing average completion time from 40 days to 27 days, an improvement of 33%.
Introduction
Infrastructure teams often balance urgent operational requests with projects and longer-term improvement work. As the number of requests grows, determining what needs attention first can become increasingly difficult. Without a clear system for managing priorities, employees can spend valuable time sorting through work instead of completing it.
A Canadian university used Kure to take a structured approach to this challenge. Kure guided the project team through the improvement process, helping them better understand the problem, identify what was getting in the way, and develop practical solutions. The project also supported Ethical Efficiency by reducing unnecessary effort while helping employees focus their time on work that delivered the greatest value.
The Problem
The university's infrastructure team was managing a growing queue of service tickets. With active, inactive, and outdated requests competing for attention, employees had difficulty quickly identifying which work was most important.
As the queue grew, employees spent more time reviewing and organizing requests, contributing to slower ticket completion and making it more difficult to focus on higher-value improvement work. Improving the process was important to helping the organization make better use of its resources while providing timely, reliable service to stakeholders.
The Root Causes
With Kure guiding the team's problem-solving efforts, the project revealed an important issue: there was no formal process for separating inactive and outdated requests from current priorities.
Older requests remained mixed with active work, creating unnecessary clutter in the queue. Without a standardized way to prioritize requests and manage the backlog, employees had to spend additional time determining what required attention, making the entire process more difficult to manage.
The Solutions
Using Kure, the team developed a straightforward system for organizing requests and keeping attention focused on current priorities.
The university created a dedicated Backlog classification for continuous improvement requests that remained valuable but did not require immediate action. The team also established a standard process for reviewing the queue and moving stale requests into the backlog.
A structured ticket prioritization and triage framework was also implemented, organizing requests into categories such as operations, projects, and orders. This gave employees a consistent way to identify critical work while ensuring worthwhile improvement opportunities remained available for future consideration.
The Results
The improved process gave the infrastructure team greater visibility and control over its workload. With outdated requests separated from active priorities, employees could more easily determine what needed attention and spend more time completing meaningful work.
Before Improvement
Average ticket completion time: 40 days
After Improvement
Average ticket completion time: 27 days
Overall Improvement
33% reduction in average ticket completion time
The organization also gained a clearer view of its workload, more consistent prioritization, faster decision-making, and improved responsiveness to stakeholder needs. Rather than allowing worthwhile ideas to become lost within an overloaded queue, the new backlog preserved them for future improvement efforts.
Conclusion
By using Kure to guide its improvement project, the Canadian university transformed an overloaded ticket queue into a more organized and manageable process. A few focused changes helped the team reduce average ticket completion time by 33% while improving visibility, prioritization, and productivity.
The project also demonstrates Ethical Efficiency in action. Instead of asking employees to work harder within an inefficient system, the university improved the system itself, reducing unnecessary effort and allowing employees to focus on higher-value work. With Kure providing a structured approach to problem-solving and continuous improvement, the organization is better equipped to build on this success and tackle future opportunities for improvement.
*We value our clients’ confidentiality. While we’ve changed their names, the results are real.
