Best Practices for Service Desk with multiple teams/groups/departments

Rick Geverman February 18, 2016

What are the best practices for setting up a Service Desk with multiple teams/groups?

For example, there are 5 teams available to take ownership of one item; how is JSD best employed so that one ticket is assigned to a specific department?

 

I understand there are two general ways to accomplish this grouping, each with shortcomings. Is there a way to get around these shortcomings?

#1: Managing issues via Group Ownership

  • Must manually create a queue for each user (JQL like the following is not compatible: currentuser() IN membersOf("Assigned To Department") )

#2: Set up each team/group as a separate project

  • Cannot create a Workflow Post Function to move the issue to another project

Thanks!

2 answers

1 accepted

2 votes
Answer accepted
Nicolas Bourdages
Rising Star
Rising Star
Rising Stars are recognized for providing high-quality answers to other users. Rising Stars receive a certificate of achievement and are on the path to becoming Community Leaders.
February 18, 2016

If all 5 teams are actually working on the same product, I would avoid the multiple projects solution.

I don't understand though why you'd need a different queue for each user in the group ownership solution if that JQL statement doesn't work. The issue belongs to a group when it comes in, but it's not assigned to anyone yet. Therefore, you only need 5 queues, in the format of groupCustomField ="Team1" AND assignee IS EMPTY

The reason why you'd want the empty assignee clause is so that you could have a 6th queue with the JQL assignee = currentUser(). That way, each user can work with this one queue once they have issues assigned to them.

0 votes
Rick Geverman February 19, 2016

Thanks for your answer Nicolas.

In the case of using groupCustomField, if multiple queues per group are required, then the list of queues would end up becoming quite large. For example, the business requirement is that the issue is reassigned to the team on a certain condition (e.g. Waiting for Customer). The queue JQL in this case would be: groupCustomField="Team1" AND status = "Waiting for Customer" AND assignee IS EMPTY. In this scenario, if 4 types of queues per team are required, then everyone working on the project would have 20+ queues to choose from. Is there a way to compare a lookup of a user's attributes to a field in an issue to use in a queue's JQL query?

In this configuration, is there a way to send a notification to the members of a team, based off of groupCustomField?

Thanks!

Nicolas Bourdages
Rising Star
Rising Star
Rising Stars are recognized for providing high-quality answers to other users. Rising Stars receive a certificate of achievement and are on the path to becoming Community Leaders.
February 19, 2016

The link to the documentation you provided explains how to send notifications to groups of users:

Configure an email notification in your project's notification scheme to be sent to the 'Group Custom Field Value'.

In my own setup, I don't have a single project in which more than one team may pick up issues. We have 6 service desks. If you have JIRA software (with Agile boards), I suggest you use boards as your queues. Each team has its own board, filtered from the group custom field.

One of our desks though is for a product for which the tickets may be dispatched to different support teams. In this case, we don't need all the team members to be agents in your service desk. We only need one person, who in turn creates more technical-sounding issues in the development projects, coordinates their resolution and keeps the customer informed.

If that's not an option, and if you don't want lots of queues, then I guess you need to use multiple projects with multiple service desks. Moving the issues between projects in case the tickets are submitted to the wrong desk is not ideal, but if your portal is sufficiently clear (and your customers learn from their mistakes), that should be a rare occurrence.

Suggest an answer

Log in or Sign up to answer