Anyone who has worked in IT service management for more than five minutes has noticed something: users are cats. Not in a derogatory way — cats are wonderful, independent, fascinating creatures. But they are completely, gloriously, infuriatingly unpredictable. And so are users.
Here's the proof.
1. You Can Open the Door, But They Won't Go Through
Mona goes and sits by the door, staring longingly at the field. She turns her head and looks accusingly at me. I get up and hold the door wide open, make encouraging gestures, Mona turns around, walks away from the door, licks her paws, and stares at me.
Sound familiar? You build a beautiful self-service portal. You write clear step-by-step guides. You send the link in three emails and a Teams message. You even make a video. And still, on Monday morning, the phone rings: "Hi, can you just log something for me?"
You can't force adoption. You can only keep holding the door open and hope that one day, on their own terms, they'll decide to walk through.
2. They Ignore the Cat Tree and Sleep on MY Chair!
I bought Lucy a cat tree with two caves and a raised platform. It even has a toy. Does she use it…. nah she sleeps on my favourite chair that I bought for reading in with a Sixties-style overhanging lamp to illuminate the area
You spend months selecting, configuring and implementing the perfect ITSM platform. Workflow automation. Self-healing tickets. A knowledge base with AI-assisted search. It is, genuinely, a thing of beauty.
They just email Dave instead. Nobody planned for Dave, but everyone loves Dave, and no amount of enterprise tooling will change that.
3. The Scratching Post Is Right There
You put the scratching post next to the sofa. Charlie looks at the scratching post. Then she scratches the wall. You cover the holes she makes with scratch pads, she moves to the next unscratched place.
You write the knowledge base article. It answers the question exactly. Word for word. With screenshots. The user reads the title, decides it probably doesn't apply to them, and logs a ticket. The ticket contains one sentence: "not working please help."
Documentation is only useful to people who believe the answer might already exist. Many users, like cats, are not those people.
4. They're Invisible During UAT and Unavoidable During an Outage
Schedule user acceptance testing? Suddenly no one is available. Three weeks of emails, calendar invites, escalations. Ghosts.
Go live with a major incident at 9:07 am on a Tuesday? Every single user, including ones you didn't know existed, will find you simultaneously.
Cats are the same. Call a cat — nothing. Open the fridge, get the ice cream out — immediate, full-speed presence from an unknown number of animals.
5. They Bring You a Dead Mouse and Expect Praise
The cat drops a dead mouse at your feet. It's a gift. The cat is proud. The cat has helped.
Users do this with IT problems. They attempt a fix, make things significantly worse, then close the ticket themselves with the note: "sorted it, thanks." You open the system the next morning to find seventeen new incidents are growing out of the original one. The user is delighted with themselves.
Service management tip: always define what "resolved" means before the user does.
6. Intermittent Faults That Cannot Be Reproduced
"It just does a thing sometimes. Not always. Mainly on Tuesdays."
Cats stare at walls. They react to invisible presences, bolt from nothing, freeze and stare at a specific corner of the ceiling. You see nothing. There is nothing. But the cat is absolutely certain.
Users experience IT problems the same way. The issue is real to them. It happened. You cannot reproduce it in the lab. Your monitoring shows nothing. And yet there it was, definitely, last Wednesday, for about thirty seconds.
Log it, park it, hope for evidence. Never dismiss the wall-starer.
7. The 4:55 pm Friday P1
Charlie will climb on top of our TV. At 3 am. For no reason. Threating to tip it over, precisely when we most want to be asleep.
Users have the Friday afternoon P1. Everything is fine all week. At 4:55 pm, as you are shutting down your laptop, something is critically broken, and it cannot wait until Monday. It has, in fact, probably been broken since Wednesday, but it only became urgent now.
This is not malice. It is simply how cats and users experience time.
8. They Only Like What They're Used To
Introduce a new cat food — even a better one — and all three of our cats will starve themselves in protest before admitting it's acceptable.
Introduce a new system, a new process, a better way of doing anything — and a meaningful percentage of users will spend six months explaining why the old way was fine, actually, and they've found a workaround so they don't have to use the new thing.
Change management isn't really about the technology. It's about convincing cats that the new food is worth trying. You need patience, consistency, and sometimes a transitional period in which you blend the old and the new until nobody notices the difference.
9. Dogs Have Owners. Cats Have Staff.
This is the most important one.
You do not own a cat. The cat permits you to live in its home and occasionally rewards you with affection completely randomly. Lucy and Mona will plonk themselves down on the sofa and expect to be stroked. Charlie demands ice cream from our bowls.
Service management professionals who think they are managing users are mistaken. Users are not there to be managed. IT exists to serve them — at the time they need it, in the way that works for them, with minimum friction and maximum reliability.
The moment you start thinking of users as difficult, you've lost the thread. Cats aren't difficult. They're just cats. And that's exactly what makes them wonderful.
In Summary
The secret to great service management is the same as the secret to getting along with cats: stop trying to control them, you can’t herd cats, meet them where they are, make the right thing the easy thing, and have enormous patience with the gap between what you built and how it will actually be used.
Your portal might be perfect. Your documentation might be flawless. But if the door doesn't open the way the cat expects, they'll find another way in — and they'll scratch a hole in the wallpaper on the way past.
Robert Pinnington is the founder of PDCA Consulting, specialising in ITSM strategy, ITIL implementation and service improvement. He has worked with cats-as-users for over 25 years and has the scratch marks to prove it.
