Service Desk Best Practice on Reopening Subtasks

Question

Do you have any recommendations or best practices on reopening subtasks when a customer reopens their request from a resolved status before the ticket is permanently closed?

If a request creates 10 subtasks, should all 10 be reopened? Should the customer chose which of the 10 should  be reopened? Do you reopen the last closed?

Looking for best practice recommendations and how you perform the action (Automation, Postfunctions, etc)

Mathew Lederman · Answer

Unfortunately that's what got us stuck where we are today. We have a full configuration built, setup, tested and working except the final step of reopen. Ideally we'd prefer to re-open the last subtask closed so somebody takes ownership of the issue, but the something between the project automation, smart values, and limitedresults() function simply doesn't work. I've been trying to troubleshoot the functionality here, but I figured I'd ask for other options in case we can't get that resolved.

Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Answer

The "general best practice" is "do what you need to to make it all work".  There's not a lot more than that because everyone will be working differently, within the context of their own processes.

You need to look at the processes that you want to follow, that will tell you what you can automate.

You've mentioned "new user onboarding" and implied that you've already automated sub-task creation for facilities, app access and mail, so I'd recommend that you look at the process of re-enabling a previous user who has left.  Do you need to raise all the sub-tasks again?  Or would it be more natural to move them into a "please re-activate" type status?  And automate those when an existing issue is re-opened.

Mathew Lederman · Answer

There has to be a general best-practice though. You cant decide on each ticket when you're getting hundreds of tickets a day