Organising requests

[JBasey]

Hi All,

 

We have recently moved to service manager from supportworks.  Previously our service desk arranged their work into various queues which were in effect user accounts named things like "application requests" or "new users" or "purchases".

Thoughout the day the service desk staff would assign incoming work to these queues and a service desk agent would be tasked with managing that queue for the day or week.

My question is what's the best way of organising incoming incidents or requests into groups that I can then assign my service desk staff to work through?

Thanks

[Hornbill Staff DR]

Hi James,

 thanks for your post.
I'd be inclined to create some request list "Views". This allows you to be selective in terms of what you view in your request list at any one time. You choose what to include in your view by selecting various conditions such as "Service is "Purchasing" " or "Summary Contains "Invoice" " etc.

What conditions you choose will depend on what works best for you. You can give your View a name to reflect what it shows (in my image I have called mine "New Starter Requests"). Once you have created a view you can share it with your team, or with other teams to ensure that everyone is working with the same view.

More information on Request List Views can be found here: https://wiki.hornbill.com/index.php/Request_List_Views

I hope that helps,
Dan

 

[Samrai]

Hi James,

You could also use Boards to achieve a similar and better management of incoming activities.  Boards would in effect allow you to create the many views that you would have had as logical teams in Supportworks.  The added difference is that you could then also use Columns to indicate varying status as well as having the ability to dictate which board and which column the request "appears in or moves to" via the Business Process.

I hope that is useful and for your information Hornbill's Services Team can create a bespoke workshop around this use case.  Workshops can be for a minimum of 2 hours and are bespoke to your environment and setup.  

Thanks,

Samrai Estefanos

[JBasey]

Hi,  thanks for the replies.

I initially did try using boards for this but there doesn't seem to be any way to limit what the board displays to one specific team.  for example if a customer raises an incident I know how to get the BPM to add this incident to a specific board list.  however if the service desk then escalates the incident to a different team for resolution and closure, the incident will still be on my board unless i manually remove it.  I cant find a way to remove these from the board once they dont belong to my team anymore.

I also tried to use views but couldn't figure out a way to break down the requests into a sensible way.  for example if i have a single catalogue item for reporting incidents i cannot find a way to have have one view for hardware incidents and one view for software incidents.  i dont want to have a different catalogue item for every type of view as it would get confusing on the portal.

I'm interested to see how everyone else does this - unless its just us who bunches types of requests together for staff to work on?

[James Ainsworth]

Hi @JBasey

How or where would you be storing if it is a Hardware or Software incident.  There are a number of other options to separate out these types of requests using the Views.  For example you could use the Request Category to set if it is hardware or software.

Regards,

James

[JBasey]

@James Ainsworth

Thats a really good idea - i hadn't thought of that and i think that will do what i need it to do.  i will give it a go tomorrow.

Glad i stayed at work late now!

Thanks