Make friends with some sysadmins. When the gears aren't spinning, ping them on IM to find out why. Usually there's a very good reason for that.
Sysadmins are your friends if you treat them well, like human beings, and you respect their work. If you treat them like a ticket processing machine, or worse, like an obstacle, you'll struggle.
I learned this from 4 years of deploying apps at UBS (one of the world's largest banks), which had exactly this kind of ticketing system (called GCMS, iirc). I was IRC-pals with 3 different sysadmins in 3 different continents (yes, there was an internal IRC system), and so whenever things got stuck in the pipes, I could ask them to have a look in the system and see what was going on. As for the other sysadmins, I always treated them courteously, used the ticket system, and got the necessary approvals whenever I could.
The one downside of this is I ended up being stuck managing lots of deployments, because I was good at it.
I think this goes both ways. I understand that sysadmins are human and get busy and/or make mistakes. Most of the time though, nagging developers could be pleased by sysadmins being a bit more proactive in communicating with people.
After all, when a ticket has been open for a week with no response, most people will start to get a bit frustrated and take it out on the sysadmin. A simple "Hey, know you've been waiting on this a while, but I have X, Y, and Z to take care of before I can get to it" will do wonders for sysadmin/developer relations.
It goes a bit deeper than that - a ticketing system by itself is just a tool, and isn't a process or a solution.
If Sysadmin just threw up a ticketing system and said "put your stuff in there and we'll get to it" - then they can't expect things to get much better than email. It's a start, but only a small one.
They need to put the proper process, SLA's (even if they are approximate) and review procedures around the system to make sure it's meeting the needs of the rest of they organisation.
Sysadmins are your friends if you treat them well, like human beings, and you respect their work. If you treat them like a ticket processing machine, or worse, like an obstacle, you'll struggle.
I learned this from 4 years of deploying apps at UBS (one of the world's largest banks), which had exactly this kind of ticketing system (called GCMS, iirc). I was IRC-pals with 3 different sysadmins in 3 different continents (yes, there was an internal IRC system), and so whenever things got stuck in the pipes, I could ask them to have a look in the system and see what was going on. As for the other sysadmins, I always treated them courteously, used the ticket system, and got the necessary approvals whenever I could.
The one downside of this is I ended up being stuck managing lots of deployments, because I was good at it.