[members-discuss] Registry Services Ticket Response Time

Hi Felipe,

On 9/17/21 3:01 AM, Felipe Victolla Silveira wrote:
> Elvis,
> 
> We have received your messages and registered your dissatisfaction.

okay.

> 
> We will provide statistics when we can but the priority here is to

That's not acceptable. "When we can" is not a good answer, not when you 
have these numbers already. It's been three weeks already!


> address the issue with waiting times so our members can proceed with
> their own operations. Solving this issue is what we will focus on rather
> than having staff resources diverted to provide statistics. We work to
> serve all of our members and that is what our efforts here will be
> guided by.
> 

I am sure you already have all these numbers. How could you monitor the 
department's efficacy otherwise?
You actually provided the numbers for the first 3 months of this year 
during the RIPE82 meeting. All I am asking is that you provide the same 
but for a longer period.

All I've asked is a simple question. For the past few years, how many 
days in a month has RS failed to honor the SLA and how many days has it 
actually replied to all tickets within the SLA?

Also, for comparison reasons, how many tickets were replied to, monthly, 
in the past few years? I found your slide 7 in the RIPE82 presentation 
and that shows you close 3k-6k tickets per month. Is that the right 
number? If you fail the SLA for up to 1000 tickets per month, why is 
this not raising a lot of alarm bells everywhere?

I am only asking these questions because at 6k tickets per month (which 
is about the maximum I see from your partial statistics) it means that 
RS closes less than 300 tickets per day and if only an average of 75% of 
the department is working on tickets only an average of 10 tickets are 
closed per FTE per day. That's quite a low number.
(I used this page ** to see how many FTEs are in RS, hope this is 
correct info, if the trainees are not included in the page, then the 
number are even worse)
Also, you use the excuse for Q4 warning that you have hired a lot of new 
people, that was the same excuse for Q1, why will you have a really bad 
service in Q4 (as advertised by Marco's e-mail in early August) if you 
have already hired a bunch of people 6+ months ago. How much does 
training take?


I know.. I asked for a lot of data, I understand that the whole team is 
working continuously to answer members' requests and I agree that they 
should focus on replying to LIRs instead of collecting statistics for 
me. However, instead of sending long e-mail replies, you may want to 
just reply to a couple of simple questions for which you already have 
the data.

Your refusal to do that for weeks is unheard of. I have never before 
seen an NCC representative refuse to provide a number a member has asked 
for, especially a number that I know you have easily available and you 
are probably looking at weekly.

Felipe, I'll keep e-mailing you, Marco, the Board and this list weekly 
until you DO provide the answer to the simple question "over the past 
few years, since you stopped showing this information transparently, how 
many working days per month/year have you failed to honor the SLA and 
what's the percentage of the failures (# of tickets) out of the total # 
of tickets?"


> Wait times per member request are determined by a number of factors and
> where additional checks are required, the request will take longer. And
> while some requests take longer to process than others, our staff need
> to apply all necessary due diligence measures rather than rely on
> assertions from the member involved. This is how we maintain a robust
> registry of member resources.

Again, this is in line with your strategy change from 'we trust our 
members fully with the data they provide' to 'we suspect all our members 
are now committing fraud and we must protect their resources'. This 
change has been gradual but the level of the mistrust I see now is 
alarming. Maybe you should focus on passing the responsibility of 
keeping an SSO account secure to the LIRs and stop questioning the 
validity/legality of the information provided by the LIRs to the RIPE NCC.

If someone provides illegal/falsified documentation you always have the 
option to revert the change you've made once a court has decided against 
your initial decision. You should not waste so much time of the RS 
department on manually verifying whether an ID is valid or whether a 
signature is similar to one you have on record.

I applaud the attempts to automate some of these processes, finally 
something good happening regarding this. Although I am afraid that this 
change may add even more bureaucracy and push the blame for the failure 
of RS to the third party.

Do these third parties have any SLA? Have you tested their services? How 
fast do they move?


As for the sanctions, Marco has been using this excuse for a few years 
now, every time I called the NCC and asked for a manager because a 
ticket was not handled in time or correctly, this was one of the 
excuses. I don't understand why you can't have this check done faster, 
maybe when a company registers as a member or as an annual/monthly 
automated check. Why delay all transfer tickets for a process that could 
be done automatically? You already use DUNS data about all companies, 
you already do background checks.. why not do them automatically and 
only do manual work where the data is not easily accessible?

I thought the NCC was not interested in politics and will support anyone 
that needs to connect to the internet. Is a monopoly in IP addresses and 
AS Numbers now going to censure individuals or companies from the 
internet? Laws come and go, sanctions are added and removed constantly, 
why are you joining this political game now?

> In your mails, you indicate excellent knowledge of what is involved in
> processing member requests. I can assure you that the nature of the work
> involved is of a completely different order to when you worked here. Our
> staff are working extremely hard to meet all the requirements involved
> in processing requests under these circumstances and I reject any
> implication otherwise.

That was a reply I sent to another member that was complaining about 
your services. It was actually in your defense that I replied to them 
saying that the reason my ticket was resolved before theirs was because 
my ticket only needed an evaluation of a few documents (that I strive to 
make sure they are complete and correct) and approval. I am not sure 
what other 'implication' you have seen in my replies, please clarify.

As replied to Marco separately, please send my apologies to the RS team, 
my former colleagues, my words were never meant to demoralize them. My 
words are a statement on the POOR job of the department’s current 
management and their constant failure to fix issues reported for years. 
This is not something coming out of the blue. I have been taking to RS 
management over the past 2-3 years reporting these issues constantly.


Felipe - you say in the presentation here (*) that you have changed the 
way you calculate the % of the tickets responded withing one day and 
that is why you were only able to provide the data for 3 months of 2021.
Please explain clearly what exactly has changed because, as far as I can 
see, the calculation of the failures to respect the SLA is the same 
today as it was 10 years ago.

And if nothing has changed, why did you say it changed? Was it because 
2020 was a disaster? Why not show the numbers of Q4 2020 when you 
clearly had those?
Felipe, providing just the information that looks not so bad (even 
though the information provided was really bad as well) looks like a 
tactic to misrepresent the efficacy of the department you run. Please 
provide the numbers for 2020 to prove me wrong.

Also, please stop the tactic of providing only the numbers you want to 
show. Provide complete information next time so we can really understand 
what's going on. I am not implying anything, I am accusing you of 
providing partial data that looks better.
Just like the RIPE NCC refuses to show Israel (but shows Palestine) in 
the Menog stats ***, politics I've never understood.


I actually hope a reply from the Board will come sometime soon, they 
have failed to supervise the RS management and penalize the failures to 
respect the SLA for more than a couple of years already :(


Felipe, Marco.. had I had ONE ticket answered withing the SLA in the 
past Q (probably year), I might have been easier on you. But there 
hasn't been even one ticket replied to within SLA and that is unacceptable.


* https://ripe82.ripe.net/archives/video/584/
** 
https://www.ripe.net/about-us/staff/structure/the-registry/registry-services
*** 
https://www.menog.org/presentations/menog-19/493-IPv4runout-Presentation-MENOG19.pdf 
(slides 23,24)
https://www.menog.org/presentations/menog-19/485-RIPE_NCC_Update_2019_MENOG.pdf 
(slides 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 24)
https://www.menog.org/meetings/previous/ (look at all the RIPE NCC 
presentations over the years)


Kind regards,
Elvis

> 
> Regards,
> Felipe
> 
> [1] https://ripe82.ripe.net/archives/video/584/ 
> <https://ripe82.ripe.net/archives/video/584/>
> 
>> On 14 Sep 2021, at 12:59, Elvis Daniel Velea <elvis at v4escrow.net 
>> <mailto:elvis at v4escrow.net>> wrote:
>>
>> Dear Felipe,
>>
>> while we wait for you to crop up a roadmap, I am still waiting for the 
>> statistics I asked from Marco weeks ago.
>>
>> Marco, I’d like to see real numbers and not just .. this Q we handled 
>> x% more tickets than last Q. Usually when statistics are presented 
>> this way, without backing numbers, they express a story you want us to 
>> see and not the whole picture.
>>
>> So, while Felipe works on the roadmap, please send us the statistics 
>> that you already have about number of tickets handled daily, number of 
>> FTEs working on those tickets daily and make sure we receive these 
>> numbers for at least since you stopped showing this information 
>> transparently (circa 2015). I hope you can provide these numbers 
>> swiftly and it won’t take weeks to provide them but rather days 
>> (you’ve been working on these stats/numbers since my initial e-mail 
>> requesting them, right?)
>>
>> Also, you avoid to respond to one very important question: how many 
>> working days in this year have you respected the agreed SLA and how 
>> many working days you failed to respect it. I am sure you already have 
>> this number and can provide it _today_.
>>
>> Elvis
>>
>> PS: I have yet to see a ticket handled within the SLA for months, 
>> still hope this will change swiftly and not months/quarters from now
>>
>> On Tue, Sep 7, 2021 at 08:11 Felipe Victolla Silveira 
>> <fvictolla at ripe.net <mailto:fvictolla at ripe.net>> wrote:
>>
>>     Dear Gert, Elvis,
>>
>>     First, let me recognise that the ticketing system has been a sore
>>     point for a number of years and we have made little progress in
>>     addressing the issues that you and others have raised. We are not
>>     overly proud of our record here.
>>
>>     In the next few weeks, we plan to publish roadmaps with our plans
>>     for the next quarter[1]. We will make sure the ticketing system is
>>     covered here.
>>
>>     Given there are other areas which may need priority, I can't
>>     promise that you will be completely satisfied by what we propose
>>     in terms of the ticketing system. However, having public roadmaps
>>     should help to inform discussions about what we focus on and where
>>     trade-offs need to be made. Publishing more detail about our plans
>>     and tracking feedback or changes should also make it easier to
>>     hold us to account when we fail to deliver.
>>
>>     So, if you can bear with us a little longer, once this is ready we
>>     can continue the discussion on this list, using these roadmaps as
>>     a starting point.
>>
>>     Kind regards,
>>     Felipe
>>
>>     [1] Using our recent RPKI roadmap as a model:
>>     https://www.ripe.net/manage-ips-and-asns/resource-management/rpki/rpki-planning-and-roadmap
>>     <https://www.ripe.net/manage-ips-and-asns/resource-management/rpki/rpki-planning-and-roadmap>
>>
>>>     On 6 Sep 2021, at 18:07, Gert Doering <gert at space.net
>>>     <mailto:gert at space.net>> wrote:
>>>
>>>     Hi,
>>>
>>>     On Mon, Aug 30, 2021 at 09:06:54PM -0700, Elvis Daniel Velea wrote:
>>>>     PS: Note that I wanted to also send an e-mail about the RIPE NCC's
>>>>     ticketing system (zendesk) to the members-discuss mailing list
>>>>     and to
>>>>     the board members. I will wait for an answer to the e-mail I
>>>>     sent to HPH
>>>>     one week ago (which he promised he'll forward to the relevant
>>>>     team for a
>>>>     reply).
>>>
>>>     The ticket system from hell.
>>>
>>>     I'm looking forward to read the issues *you* have with it.
>>>
>>>     My complaints have been delivered to Felipe in person, years ago, and
>>>     been summarily ignored.  As far as I can see.
>>>
>>>     But that might be better suited in its own thread, and in
>>>     ncc-services.
>>>
>>>     Gert Doering
>>>            -- NetMaster
>>>     -- 
>>>     have you enabled IPv6 on something today...?
>>>
>>>     SpaceNet AG                      Vorstand: Sebastian v. Bomhard,
>>>     Michael Emmer
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>>>     Grundner-Culemann
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>>
>> -- 
>> This message was sent from a mobile device. Some typos may be possible.
> 

-- 
Kind regards,
Elvis Daniel Velea
Chief Executive Officer
V4Escrow LLC
elvis at v4escrow.net
+1-702-970-0921