Best practice for multiple service desks

[Sergio Passalacqua]

What is the best practice for companies that have multiple support groups (Service Desk, Production support, Security, System admin) where we want to have different workflows based on the support team. In addition, one of the requirements is to have security around specific issue types (think employee terminations, sensitive information, etc).

What is the best practice?  Single JSD, one per support group?  How does one go about keeping customers/orgs in sync between all JSDs?  How do create an escalation process to escalate from Service desk to say Production Support?

[Jack Brickey]

Hi Sergio, for me this is a pretty straightforward solution. You would simply have different projects with specific agents for each project. If I needed to have restrictions w/in a project I would consider looking at Issue Security scheme. By having unique projects I can control who can access the issues, workflows, etc. Basically, if I have different support groups that equate to different agents supporting the groups and different workflows that equates to different projects.

[Sergio Passalacqua]

Thanks Jack!  Any thoughts on escalation best practices from one "tier" to another?

[Jack Brickey]

it depends on how formal you wish to be. Here are some ideas to consider:

• Implement escalation (Tiers) in your workflow. For example you might have a WF that looks like this: Waiting for Support --> In Progress --> Done with the typical Waiting for Customer status when you need more info back. Now if you wish to include an optional escalation to say T2 or even T3 you could add a transition from In Progress/Waiting for Support to a T2/T3 Support. Then define your queues so that T2/T3 is separate from T1.
• You could have a custom field for Tier-Support which defaults to T1 and if they find it needs to be escalated they would change that field to T2 or T3. Again you can set up the queues to filter on the Tiers
• If for any reason you need to separate these tiers, for example if T3 is actually development and they need to change code to address the problem and they work w/in JSW and not JSD, then you can create linked issues from JSD to the JSW project using automation. The JSD issue is transitioned to say Development status and holds there (pausing JSD SLAs) until the dev team completes the necessary changes.

[Sergio Passalacqua]

Thanks Jack!