Ownership and current assignee

[DougA]

We're realigning our service desk to be more in line with ITIL. One of the major changes in process for us is setting an Owner (ITIL speak) for each request so the customer will have a single point of contact during the life of a request regardless of who the request is currently assigned to (owner in Hornbill speak). We do need to be able to change the owner and filter the request list on the Owner. I did wonder if I could do it with a connection but I couldn't figure out how to assign the logger as the default value.

Got any pointers?

Thanks

Doug

[Steven Boardman]

Hi @DougA

Thanks for the post.   

Connections are designed for adding more Customers to a request - i.e impacted, interested, raised on behalf of etc. 

You are able to add additional Members to a a request, and these members can be other support staff or yourself.

In regards to the ownership of a request in Service Manager, this will show as the support staff who is currently assigned the request.  Now if there is a desire to retain the ownership with say 1st Line and a member of that team so the customer knows who to contact then you can leave a request assigned to the first person.   If they need to bring in other support staff or teams to progress the issue then there are options to do this without assigning the ownership of the request away.

1. Add the required support staff as a member and use the @mention option to bring them into the request and let them know what assistance is needed.  This is an informal collaborative approach.

2. Create request sub tasks / activities for another support staff user, or team and assign the assistance you need through a task with both details of what is needed, and due dates.  

Obviously with the above approach the owner of the request would always remain with the customers contact point, but this may not work if you need to manage requests and move them and ownership between teams.  

Another approach could be how you notify the customer about their designated contact for their request. You could build into your supporting business process, a Suspend Await Request Owner node which would allow the support member to take ownership of the request.  Directly following this node, you could send an email to the customer, using an email template which includes the variables of the Request Owner, and their contact details, therefore providing the customer with the contact information they need for their request.  Now if the request is subsequently assigned between support staff, teams etc the customer will still have the contact details for the original owner who they can contact.

In order for the support staff member to keep track of their requests which are being reassigned but they are the primary contact for, they can add themselves as members, and can filter the request list by I'm a Member.  They can also choose to follow the requests so they see updates in their newsfeed for all requests they are the primary contact for but may not be the current assigned owner in Service Manager.

I hope that gives you a couple of ideas?  or a combination of things to try?

Steve