Is it possible to manage group of agents ?

Question

Hello,
I am new to JIRA Service Desk (v3.16.5), and would like to know how to resolve the following need.
I created a JIRA IT Service Desk project (key = SDK) to manage the IT support of the company.
Ultimately we will have 15 agents distributed in several teams of 3 or 4 agents each:
• Team Service Desk
• Team IT Network
• Team VM infra
•…

All incoming tickets will be handled by the 3 agents of the Service Desk team, who will then transfer them to the other teams.
My need :
• All members of the team to which the ticket is transferred must be notified (they are agents).
• From what I understand, they should be added to the Custom Field "Requests Participant" of the issue
Questions :
• Can we manage groups of agents? If yes, how ?
• If not, does that mean that I will have to add one by one all the members of the team in the field "Requests Participant" of the issue if I want to transfer the ticket to a team?

Thanks in advance for your help.

Catherine

Petter Gonçalves · Answer

Hello @support for vo

I'm glad my answer has helped you.

I'm afraid I don't have a definitive answer to your new question tough. I mean, by the scenario you provided so far, you can easily manage all your teams with a single Service desk project, using multiple queues and request types to properly differentiate their work.

You can also use multiple projects to achieve the same scenario you have in a more gradual way, however, you'll definitely spend more time configuring several projects (Roles, Notification scheme, etc) and the teams will not be able to interact with each other in the same practical way.

That being said, I suggest trying to keep your teams working in the same project to keep it simple and visualizable in a single view. If you notice that more gradual customization is required, you can easily migrate the work (issues) of a specific team to another project by using the bulk operation functionality.

Just make sure you are able to distinguish what is the team related to each issue in the project with JQL, by adding them with request types or components.

Let us know if this information helps.

support for vo · Answer

Thanks a lot.
It is clearer like that.
Just another question regarding good practices.
Is it better to do several small Service Desk projects (for example one per team) or just one large Service Desk project ?
BR
Catherine

Petter Gonçalves · Answer

Hello @support for vo

Thank you for reaching out.

I believe you might be misunderstanding some concepts from Jira Service desk, which is natural due to the complexity of the Application. Please, allow me to provide you with some concepts and details so we can confirm we are on the same page here:

About this sentence:

• From what I understand, they should be added to the Custom Field "Requests Participant" of the issue

Actually, the request participant field is used to share the request with other customers, as explained in the documentation below:

What are request participants?

Agents added to this field will be treated as customers and will be notified with the wrong notification scheme. That being said, don't add agents to this field.

About these sentences:

All members of the team to which the ticket is transferred must be notified (they are agents).

• Can we manage groups of agents? If yes, how?
• If not, does that mean that I will have to add one by one all the members of the team in the field "Requests Participant" of the issue if I want to transfer the ticket to a team?

To send a notification to a whole group of Agents, you can follow the steps below:

* Create a Group for each team you have in your Service desk
* Create a Group Picker (multiple choice) Custom Field, adding it to your Service desk screens
* Navigate to your project > Project settings > Notifications (Not customer notifications) and add the custom field you created to be notified with the updates you want

Doing the steps above, once you select the group (team) you need in the custom field of the issue, all the Agents added to that group will be notified about that specific issue.

Let us know if you have any questions.