From: Priya Nair, Support Lead, Northwind Help Desk
The team feels buried. People keep saying "the backlog", but nobody can tell me how big it is, how old it's or where it comes from. Before I ask for more staff, I need facts.
Data: Northwind Help Desk tickets for 2025, one row per ticket, with Created Date, Closed Date (empty while a ticket is open), Priority, Team, Product Area and a 1 to 5 Satisfaction rating when the customer gave one.
What I need: how many tickets are open and how old they are, which team and product area struggle most, whether waiting hurts satisfaction, and where I should act first.
This case study uses the help desk tickets, which have gaps on purpose: open tickets have no Closed Date, and many tickets have no Satisfaction rating. Handling those NULLs correctly is half the work.
Each step continues from your view in the step before, and some steps start by clearing the sheet. Build the view, read the answer from it and enter it in the panel above the worksheet. The last step asks for a recommendation: pick the one the evidence supports, not the one that sounds most dramatic.
Watch for two traps: counting open tickets with = NULL (it never matches) and comparing raw counts between teams of different sizes.