Why I insist on a single route for requests

This is a note about something that sounds like bureaucracy and is the opposite of it.

In most small companies requests arrive through five routes at once: phone, email, chat, via a third person, and in the corridor. Each of them is convenient on its own. Together they produce a state where nobody knows how many open cases there are — including the person handling them.

What gets lost, and why

It is not carelessness. It is arithmetic.

A request passed on verbally while somebody is doing something else exists only in two people’s memory. If three others arrive at the same time, one of them will be lost — not because anyone dismissed it, but because it was never written down anywhere.

The consequences are predictable:

• the loudest case beats the more important one, because priority is set by insistence rather than by impact on the business,
• several people report the same thing separately and the work is duplicated,
• there is no way to answer “where does my case stand”,
• after six months nobody knows what actually broke most often — and that is the one piece of information that lets you stop firefighting.

The last point matters most. Without a record there is no repeatability, and without repeatability the cause cannot be removed — leaving you reacting to symptoms indefinitely.

What this means in practice

It does not mean deploying a large system. In a small company one address that all requests go to is enough, plus the rule that a case exists once it has arrived there.

That rule also runs the other way, and that is its most important part: if something arrived at that address, it will be handled. Without that, it is just an inconvenience.

What the record gives:

• every case has a number, a history and a visible state,
• order follows impact rather than who called last,
• the person reporting can see the case is alive, so they do not have to chase,
• after a quarter you can see what breaks most often.

What it does not take away

The phone stays. An outage that stops work gets reported by phone — it would be absurd to make somebody write an email when mail is down.

The separation looks like this: the phone is a way of raising the alarm, the defined route is a way of running the case. After a phone call the case still gets written down — just by whoever answered rather than by whoever reported it.

That single sentence removes most of the resistance, because the resistance almost always comes from a fear that “now we won’t be able to just ring”.

Introducing it without a fight

Do not announce the rule before the route works. First an address that answers and responds, then the message that this is the proper route.

Answer the first requests quickly. The first weeks decide whether people accept the new channel as functional. If the reply comes after three days, everyone will go back to phoning, and they will be right.

Hold to it yourself. If the person handling IT accepts cases in the corridor, the rule does not exist regardless of what is written down.

Do not punish the wrong channel. A case reported in the wrong place still gets handled — with one sentence about where it will be faster next time.

Why this is in the client’s interest, not mine

A defined route looks like a convenience for the provider. In reality it is the opposite: it is the only mechanism by which a client can check whether they are getting what they pay for.

Without a record there is no way to show how many requests there were, how long the response took, and whether under ongoing care there are fewer of them over time. And that last one is the right measure of this work — the only one I can show instead of promise.