Show triage team agent's availability for new work

Question

I have a Helpdesk team using Service Desk to workflow all issues. The first step of the process is to "triage" and "assign" out new tickets. The triage team is responsible for ensuring that all relevant data is present on a ticket before assigning it to a support technician.

The problem I have is with assigning the ticket to a support technician.

In JIRA core, we have a dashboard with a filter result gadget showing "unassigned" tickets on the left. On the right, we have a gadget showing all of our techs and how many tickets they each have assigned to them. The triage person inspects to determine who has the least amount of tickets assigned to them (therefore giving them the most amount of availability for new work in a perfect world), and assigns the next ticket to that person.

In JIRA ServiceDesk, all I can see is my "unassigned" tickets. I have no way to determine who the next ticket should be assigned to. For the time being, the Triage team is having to keep one window open in Service Desk on monitor 1, and a second window open on monitor 2 showing JIRA Core.

Does anyone have a more elegant solution to keep my agents in ServiceDesk?

Jeff Tillett · Answer

I don't dislike your suggestion, however I have a couple of questions. 
1. Are you suggesting people manually go into the "triaged" list and pick their own tickets? 
2. How would you prevent agents from "cherry picking" the easy tickets?

Phill Fox · Answer

The following suggestion may be inappropriate to your organisation but if you were to allow the support technicians to pick the next priority ticket rather than assign you would be able to focus on establishing the priority of tickets at all times and always making sure that the next ticket was picked up by the next available support technician.  This would then give you a clear indication of the number of tickets not currently being actively worked on by a support technician, whereas from my understanding of the current situation you need to total each support technicians tickets to get such a metric.
So when you complete triage you would assign the ticket to either noone, a user for the queue or potentially if a single support technician has the skill direct to them.