Internal service
A ticket that knows whose move it is
Most of the life of a support ticket is spent waiting on somebody, and most help desks record that as one word. This one has a state for waiting on the person who raised it and a state for waiting on a vendor outside the business, so the queue tells you where the time is going.
What happens to a request
- Requester
Raises it
What is happening, who is affected, what they have already tried, and the best number to reach them on. Asked once, up front.
- Service desk
Picks it up
Category and priority, then into progress. A ticket can go back to the requester for more, or out to a vendor, without leaving the record.
- Technician
Diagnoses it
Diagnosis, cause and what was done — written for the next person who sees this fault, not for the person who reported it.
- Service desk
Resolves and closes
Closing asks for the diagnosis fields, so a ticket cannot be shut with nothing recorded about what actually fixed it.
Waiting on them is a state, not a note
A ticket that needs something from the person who raised it moves to Waiting for you. It stops counting as yours, and it stops being invisible in a queue of things nobody is working on.
Vendors without leaving the record
With the vendor hands the ticket to an organisation outside your business and brings their answer back into the same ticket, with their name on it.
The diagnosis is yours
Diagnosis and cause are internal. What your technicians write to each other is not what the requester reads, so nobody has to phrase a root cause twice.
Mandatory where it bites
Required fields gate leaving a state rather than entering it. You can take a ticket in hand before you know the cause, and you cannot close it afterwards without one.
Your categories, your priorities
The area arrives with five categories and four priorities as an example, and they are the first thing to change. Both are axes rather than fields, so you can scope somebody's role to Printers and Printing, or to Critical, without building a second help desk.
Start with it