How does your team work with Service Requests?

[Darryl St_ Pierre]

We have an existing service desk where all 8 members of the department are licensed as agents, but generally only 2 of them interact with requesters.

The team is looking to rework their setup so that they can get very detailed reporting on the status of a request as well as track the time and work being spent.

My approach is to have their existing service desk simply track the high level statuses, i.e. - In Progress, Waiting for Customer (or Support, or Vendor), and have a backend Software project for the specific state of the work, i.e. - Design, Review, Development, QA, UAT, Deployment. That presents me with two options: Create these specific Statuses for the backend project with a complex workflow (not all Statuses used for all requests), or break down the various steps into subtasks that reflect the status - a subtask for Design, another for Review, etc.

I know in either case I can link the backend task (or task and subtasks) to the front end ticket. What I don't know, because I am light on Report/Filter/Dashboard knowledge, is how difficult either of these options will be to report on.

And finally, is my approach wrong? Should I instead be highly customizing the service desk to track all the specifics? To me that seems counter-intuitive and a lot of work, but most of what I know about Jira design is from necessity and what my org wants, and not necessarily the best way to do things.

I honestly would welcome any and all feedback. I'm sure there are many different ways people are handling similar situations, and I'm trying to get a sense for what has worked best for others.