The Ping That Never Became a Ticket

Picture this. It is Thursday, 18:22. An executive’s laptop will not join the board pack on a hotel Wi-Fi that has been hostile all week. Intune shows the device as healthy. The meeting starts in thirty-eight minutes. They do what busy people do when the portal feels slow and the stakes feel high: they message the Team Lead who “always sorts it.”

You are mid-handoff to APAC. You still answer. You reset, rejoin, reassure. The board pack opens. Nobody files a ticket. There is no RCA, no knowledge article, no SLA clock — only a quiet win in a private chat and an analyst who will still be reachable at 22:00 next time.

Friday morning, the same symptom lands on the main desk as three separate “urgent” chats from people who heard there is a back door. Your queue looks calm. Your week does not.

This is not VIP support. This is a shadow helpdesk.

VIP Is Legitimate. The Side Channel Is Not.

I have led IT Service Desk work across EMEA and APAC in a genuine follow-the-sun model — environments where executive travel, time-critical briefings, and high-stakes operations are normal. VIP and executive support is not vanity. Risk is real. Minutes matter. Board rooms, incident bridges, and travellers on hostile networks do not wait politely for a P3 clock.

The mistake is treating that reality as permission to build a private second org: Teams DMs, personal mobiles, “just ping me,” and heroics that never enter Jira Service Management.

Side channels feel kind in the moment. Over a quarter they become undocumented work, burned analysts, skipped RCA, an unfair queue for everyone else, and executives who still get uneven outcomes — because outcomes depend on who answers their phone, not on a designed entitlement.

Green SLAs on the main desk can coexist with a VIP experience that is either magical or chaotic depending on the day. We already know green clocks are not the whole story. A shadow path makes the lie worse: the work that most needs measurement is the work that never appears.

What Proper VIP Looks Like

A healthy VIP model is not a secret rota of favourite people. It is a named path inside the ITSM tool — visible to the desk, measurable to leadership, fair to the queue.

What good looks like in practice is unglamorous:

  • Clear entitlement. Who is VIP, for what, and for how long. Role-based, reviewed, and published — not a vibe list that grows every time someone is important this week.
  • A named path in Jira Service Management. Dedicated request types or priorities, VIP queue or skill group, and routing that humans can explain in one sentence. The executive still gets speed. The organisation gets a record.
  • Measured SLAs and XLAs. Faster clocks where risk warrants them — and experience checks beside them: time to useful work, reopen rate, “explained twice,” and whether the person felt held across a handoff. XLAs do not replace VIP SLAs. They stop speed from becoming theatre.
  • Follow-the-sun handoffs that carry the story. VIP does not get to skip the baton. If London starts it, Singapore must inherit symptoms, evidence, attempts, next action, and user context — not “exec called Chido, see chat.”
  • Knowledge back into the main desk. Every VIP fix that could hit a hundred colleagues becomes an article, a known error, or an Intune / Modern Workplace change. Privilege that never teaches the desk is just expensive silence.

Tickets can have priority. VIP needs a contract — entitlement, path, measure, handoff, learn — not a personal favour.

The Zero Queue Trap

Here is the practical nuance most teams miss.

You can publish a VIP portal, staff a senior queue, and still teach the organisation that the real path is a DM. Executives learn that tickets are for other people. Analysts learn that saying no to a ping is career risk. Managers learn to defend “we take care of our leaders” while the main desk absorbs the overflow without the context.

That is the Zero Queue trap. Not malice. Optimisation for speed without a system check. The cousin of Zero Trust still applies: trust nothing that is not verified — including the assumption that a private channel equals better support. Then get out of the way: Zero Friction for the executive who needs the board pack and for the analyst who should not be a 24/7 personal hotline.

The other trap is pretending fairness means identical speed for every request. It does not. Fairness means transparent rules. A CFO mid-close can outrank a password reset. What they should not outrank is the need for a ticket, an owner, and a lesson for the next person.

Shadow helpdesks burn your best people first. They also leave executives exposed when that one person is on leave, on a plane, or already mid-major-incident. Designed VIP survives the rota. Hero VIP does not.

This Week’s Challenge: Map One Side Channel

My challenge to you this week is simple. Do not start with a new VIP tool. Start with honesty about the path that already exists.

Pick one week. List every VIP or executive contact that landed outside the ITSM tool — Teams, mobile, hallway, “quick favour.”

Ask:

  1. Was there clear entitlement — or only urgency and familiarity?
  2. Did the work leave a record another timezone could inherit without a callback?
  3. Did the fix feed knowledge back to the main desk — or only a quiet win for one person?

If any answer unsettles you, that is the shadow.

Then design one named VIP path for the next five genuine VIP requests: entitlement rule, Jira Service Management route, SLA/XLA pair, handoff note, and a knowledge action when the issue is not unique. Coach the first one live with your team and one executive sponsor who will use the proper door in public.

When VIP support runs through the system instead of around it, leaders still get speed — and the desk stops paying for it in silence.

That is when follow-the-sun, Modern Workplace, and executive care stop competing — and start compounding.

Thanks for reading. See you next week.