Green dashboard. Red backlog.
Your operations dashboard is green across the board. Tickets resolved within SLA, response times on target, everything looking healthy. Meanwhile the backlog of lower-priority tickets, the ones that never breach SLA because nobody escalates them, has been quietly growing for two months. The dashboard is not lying. It is measuring the thing that is easy to measure, not the thing that is happening.
A metric that always looks good stops being useful the moment it stops reflecting reality.
The prompt:
You are building a check for tickets ageing quietly inside SLA.
Context: [your open ticket count broken down by age, regardless of priority level]
Build:
How many tickets have sat for longer than two weeks despite being within SLA
A short weekly review process to catch that pattern before it becomes a client complaint