Service Desk Best Practice on Reopening Subtasks

[Mathew Lederman]

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)

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

It depends on your process. 

The best practice is be to re-open the sub-tasks that need to be re-done as part of solving the problem that the parent issue represents.  But that's hard to identify out of the context of the issue.

[Mathew Lederman]

How would you go about identifying the appropriate subtask? With a typical service desk the end-user isn't even aware there can be multiple subtasks sent out to different teams, so asking them to pick is a shot in the dark. 

When a new user is onboarded to a company, for example. Subtasks go out to the facilities team, the laptop team to image a new device, multiple app teams for user account, mail, application-specific access, etc. If the user didn't get access to a specific application, do you ask them to select which to reopen?

If you do ask the user to pick a subtask based on the summary, how do show the user the different subtasks and allow them to select which to reopen?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

That's absolutely the point of my answer - you are going to need to understand your processes and the context of the issue to decide what sub-tasks to re-open.

[Mathew Lederman]

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

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

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]

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.