Multiple people working on a ticket + watchers

[peter_mcc]

hi

With 3.5 we assigned multiple people to some tickets. It isnt' a great solution but it allows the sales/basic support person to keep track of where the customer is up to as well as the two engineers who are responsible for the various bits of software that make up the customers solution. It's less than ideal because it's not clear who should do something next - though with a small team that's not such a big issue. So I can see some merit in the new "handle follow up" idea.

But what do we do when two people need to do something at the same time - eg sales person contact the customer for some info and the engineer try to replicate the problem? Our dodgy way of assigning people worked well for this - we could use the comments field to show what people needed to do.

The other thing assigning multiple people to a ticket allowed was getting customer replies to specific tickets (the ones that interested me). I can't see any way of monitoring only some tickets rather than everything in a mailbox/bucket.

Would the concept of a "watcher" make any sense? It would be useful for us - I'd probably set up rules so that the sales guy attached to each account would automatically "watch" any support issues that a customer raises without the sales guy being assigned to the ticket.

regards
Peter

[jstanden]

Hey Peter!

You bring up some great points. I've thought about a lot of this as well:

But what do we do when two people need to do something at the same time - eg sales person contact the customer for some info and the engineer try to replicate the problem?This is what the 'clone' feature did originally. There is also the ability to 'split' messages off a ticket and treat them as a new issue.

We're also working on a feature to handle 'tasks' independently from tickets -- so you could associate two tasks (one to each worker) for a given ticket.

The other thing assigning multiple people to a ticket allowed was getting customer replies to specific tickets Yeah, I've found myself thinking about this a lot too. It's very possible the watcher/notifications feature will end up with a bit more logic on the filtering.

It certainly makes sense being able to subscribe to conversations on a per-ticket basis, or for specific senders.

http://www.wgmdev.com/jira/browse/CHD-398

[peter_mcc]

Hi


This is what the 'clone' feature did originally. There is also the ability to 'split' messages off a ticket and treat them as a new issue.
Ideally, from my perspective, the ticket wouldn't get split so that everything related to the issue stays in one place. I realise this may not be compatible with the "one person for the next action" design!

We're also working on a feature to handle 'tasks' independently from tickets -- so you could associate two tasks (one to each worker) for a given ticket.
That would work well.

Yeah, I've found myself thinking about this a lot too. It's very possible the watcher/notifications feature will end up with a bit more logic on the filtering.

It certainly makes sense being able to subscribe to conversations on a per-ticket basis, or for specific senders.

Is that issue likely to be worked on in the near future? If it was it would be a big encouragement for us to change!

regards
Peter

[jstanden]

Is [improved watcher filtering and per-ticket watching] likely to be worked on in the near future? If it was it would be a big encouragement for us to change!Yeah, I don't see why not.

I currently get a copy of most of the outgoing replies our guys are doing in our main helpdesk, but I'm so busy most days I just archive them without reading them.

There are plenty of times where I'm half involved with a specific issue (e.g., I've handed it off to get my coding tasks done) and I'd much rather just have its updates sent to me. It's easy enough to add myself as a requester on the ticket, but then it's harder to filter the messages by subject -- they're a lot less obvious than notifications are.

As usual, I can't really give an exact ETA, but setting up watcher "rules" would be a major improvement (and that means it'll get done ASAP). It will likely be on the list of things we're not sure how we lived without. ;)