Ping & Pong - Case study

Introduction:

In an ideal world, an incident is resolved quickly and without the intervention of too many support teams. However, in many cases it happens that, support teams start sending incidents to each other again and again (ping pong), which of course is an unwanted situation. There is definitely a correlation between “ping pong” behavior and the overall duration of an incident.

Types of Ping Pong (Linear vs Circular)

We distinguish two types of ping pong behavior: "linear" and "circular". Both are characterized by having an unusual number of work transfers between support teams for a specific incident. In the linear behavior of ping pong, the case goes back and forth between a very small number of teams. Circular ping pong, on the other hand, is characterized by incidents that are continually sent to other support teams, generating loops to explore.

The distinction is made because the root cause hypothesis is different for everyone.

Based on experience with other incident management processes, it is expected that the most important cause of circular ping pong is incidents being routed to the wrong support team due to incorrect or incomplete information about the incident. The support team that receives such an incident concludes that they are not the right team to resolve it, and then makes an assumption based on that information when routing it to another support team. Of course, this pattern repeats until the incident is finally routed to the correct team, or when more information about the incident is available, allowing for correct routing. In contrast, a common cause for linear ping pong cases is disagreement over who should handle a particular incident.