Creating a Multi-Tiered Service Desk

[David Scherer]

In our environment developers are primarily the one also agents in the helpdesk (we don't have a dedicated support team internally).

We've been trying to create a "buffer" between our developers and operations/sales teams so they can focus on writing code as much as possible. One of things we've done is to implement a helpdesk to get support and issues out of email and phone calls. Our next step in this project is to roll out 3 tiers of support.

I'm trying to figure out the best way to implement this so that Tier 1 can escalate to tier 2 and so on, but certain request types or maybe components should automatically get created in tier 2 or 3. For example, someone creating a ticket that a service is down should jump immediately to tier 2 or 3 (depending on the service) as nobody in tier 1 is going to have a clue and would escalate it anyway. Once escalated it should continue through the normal workflow.

I've seem some plugins that might support this kind of workflow, but I was hoping to have some vanilla functionality to do this as this is a pretty standard use case in ITIL I thought but I don't really see anything in the latest version of JIRA Service Desk to support this use case.

I'm aware of the ability to customize workflows, but is there something else? If workflows are the only option, what did you do to accomplish something like this? Any feedback is appreciated.

[Katherine Paquet]

There are a couple of choices:

Utilize the Automation functionality

• https://confluence.atlassian.com/servicedeskcloud/automating-your-service-desk-732528900.html
• I have used the if/then to transition to Escalated to Tier 3 by setting up in the if section for issuetype and/or the component = some value and then Transition to the "Escalated to Tier 3"

Utilize a specific issuetype and workflow where on create it is at Escalated to Tier 3

Hope this provide additional ideas.

[Jack Brickey]

I have a similar situation put not specifically a T1, T2 but my solution may be of use so sharing here. Feel free to discard. 

1. All issues (IT and product issues) coming to our JSD project where they are triaged
2. IT issue remain in the JSD IT project. For Product Development issues we do the following:
   1. set the status to "Development" (allows us to set different SLA among other things)
   2. clone the issue and move the clone to the development project in our JIRA SW instance and assign to the appropriate developer
   3. leave the original IT issue assigned to an IT agent
3. Automation is setup to transition the IT issue to Resolved when the cloned development issue is resolved adding a comment based upon the selected resolution type. Note: I added a post-function to the "resolve issue" transition between "Development" status and "Resolved" status to set the Resolution type to Done as currently there is not way to set it via Automation.

In summary, you could use cloning to escalate while keeping your IT separate from development. This also prevents me from unnecessarily having to assigning a bunch of folks as agents.