This Desktop article will help Technicians and Admins to design and build content for a technician dashboard. The user must have the following settings enabled within the Security Role: You will need at least access to TDNext and a ticketing application to be able to build reports. Ability to build HTML modules and manage linked desktop will require TDAdmin Access. You may also need the permission to create unsanitized HTML in your environment for some module building.
Overview
The desktop tool of TeamDynamix may be the most powerful resource to drive value for your technicians. A well constructed dashboard can help to bring important work to the surface as well as filter out unnecessary information. It can also be used to bring commonly needed resources and links to the same page to allow a single-stop-shop where your technicians can reach out to all of your TDX tools as well as other organization resources.
This article will cover an example dashboard to offer you ideas of what you may want to integrate in your system. There is sample content for reports as well as some HTML code for you to use as a starting point.
Designing a Technician Dashboard
Below is a high level screen shots of how a technician dashboard may look. Note that this is a mix of grid reports, visual data in charts, and HTML tools. You will need to be a global admin in your system to create HTML content. If you do not have admin access you can still take advantage of the options in the reporting tools. Below we will unpack the example items displayed as well as other ideas that may appeal to you and provide guidance on each module to help you recreate them in your environment.
Content Examples
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Active Outage
- Active outages are shown in the above example as the top most piece of data. This will hopefully be empty most of the time but when you do have an outage, keeping your front-line team informed on current activities can be critical to effective service delivery. This report goes hand in hand with the process of using TeamDynamix to create a status page function. Read more about it here: Using Reporting and Desktops to Provide a Status Page
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Clock-Weather
- This is one example of a fun way you might use HTML modules to create fun non-standard materials for your team. Feel free to find widgets that are of value to you and try out adding them to your system through an HTML module. See more about creating custom modules like this below in the Technician Buttons, Link Tree, TDLearn, and Maintenance Activity Calendar.
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My Active Tickets
- The most common need for a technician is to know what they are personally responsible to complete. This is a straight forward report built in TDNext>Ticketing Application. The part that can really bring value to this report is the filtering. When setting up a report like this you can customize to add/remove specific data, but you also have the ability to make the report dynamic so each person that looks at their desktop will get a customized set of data focused for them. See the below screen shot to see the (current user) value in a report design:
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My Assigned Ticket Tasks
- Similar to the report above. You may have times where you need to see specifically tasks that have been assigned to you. Remember the "(Current User)" value can be used to make a flexible report that will custom fit each person.
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Tickets Awaiting our Response
- When working with tickets it is a common question to ask, "what tickets need our attention?" If someone were to comment on the ticket asking a question or sharing information back it may not be immediately obvious that the ticket is waiting for live action. Rather than checking every ticket all the time you can engage reporting to tell you when a person other than your team has modified the ticket, such as a client requestor asking a question about their ticket. To find this you can use the "Modified by" value not only as a returned value but also as a filter to limit the report to showing tickets where the last person to modify the ticket is NOT part of your team. See the screen shot below of how you might build this report around a group ("Help Desk"):
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Help Desk Team Tickets
- Another standard report needed by teams is reports that will show the whole team what they are all responsible for as a team. Use a report similar to the my active tickets above but instead a responsibility of "(Current User)" select instead a Resp Group and indicate a group.
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Customer Satisfaction Survey
- Keeping your team informed of status and success can be an important part of transparency in leading service delivery. As you develop surveys and begin getting content you may want to include response values. You may choose broad reporting or limit it to something like "Last Month" .
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Technician Buttons
- When working in TDX your technicians may need to be nimble and be able to get to different tools in the system with maximum efficiency. They may need to create tickets with single clicks, jump to the knowledge base, or even move quickly to TDAdmin as an app admin to make tweaks to forms and attributes quickly. The latter is especially true when you first go-live with a TDX environment and real world results begin to call for tweaks and adjustments. The pictured buttons can be recreated easily with the attached HTML sample content. You can find it linked in the attachments on the right hand column of this article.
- Download and open the .txt file for the Technician Buttons
- navigate to TDAdmin> Desktop Templates> HTML Modules
- Click + New to create a new module
- Set the Application to TDNext and name the module
- Click the source button in the top left of the content builder
- Paste the code into the body and adjust the URLs (currently indicated with "#") and button names to fit your org
- Save the module and test putting it on desktops
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Link Tree
- A link tree to other resources might be something to consider. Often you team will need to get access to other systems such as 2FA configurations, company intranet, HRM system, etc. This can allow your technicians to have a quick set of tools at hand while still keeping an eye on the active ticketing queue. You can find a sample HTML to go along with the "Link Tree" pictured on the desktop in the article. The sample is in the attachment section on the right hand column of this article. If you are not comfortable with HTML you can still use the WYSIWYG editor to create some basic text Hyperlinks with out copying/editing the HTML code as explained here:
- Download and open the .txt file for the Link Tree
- navigate to TDAdmin> Desktop Templates> HTML Modules
- Click + New to create a new module
- Set the Application to TDNext and name the module
- Click the source button in the top left of the content builder
- Paste the code into the body and adjust the URLs (currently all point to "https://solutions.teamdynamix.com") and button names to fit your org
- Save the module and test putting it on desktops
* Alternatively you can also add links to the applications menu (waffle menu) in TDNext. Learn more about adding external applications with this article: How To Create An External Application in TDAdmin
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TDLearn for Technicians and Reporting
- As you get started with your system you may find it helpful to provide training content to your technicians so they can quickly jump into training content and get a refresh on system elements that are new to them. The challenge with something like this is you may want to provide a significant stack of data but not want it to clutter the desktop. This is where using a collapsing accordian HTML feature might fit you well. You can see the desktop screen shot showing a single line block that says "Technician Training", however if you click on those words it expands to provide a number of training elements. Here is what it looks like expanded:
- The HTML sample content to recreate this is in the attachment section on the right hand column of this article
- Download and open the .txt file for the TDLearn HTML
- Navigate to TDAdmin> Desktop Templates> HTML Modules
- Click + New to create a new module
- Set the Application to TDNext and name the module
- Click the source button in the top left of the content builder
- Paste the code into the body
- Save the module and test putting it on desktops
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Maintenance Activity Calendar
- If you are tracking maintenance activities and change management it can be important to make your team aware of impending changes as well as historical work. This information can be populated to a ticket calendar search and pushed out to a desktop in an iframe. To accomplish this you will need to have a TDX calendar search feed URL available to use. This needs to be the Calendar Search view URL and not the Calendar feed URL. To capture this URL you need to have a Calendar Search Feed created. Navigate to TDNext> Calendar> Feeds then click on the blue link name of the feed, not the blue "URL" link, to open a screen view of the ticket search calendar. Capture the URL from the browser window here. (ex. https://mydomain.teamdynamix.com/TDNext/Apps/123/Tickets/TicketCalendar?Search=11038) Read more about Working with the TeamDyanmix Calendar
- Navigate to TDAdmin> Desktop Templates> HTML Modules
- Click + New to create a new module
- Set the Application to TDNext and name the module
- Click the source button in the top left of the content builder
- Use this code in the body and replace the "CALENDAR URL" with your calendar URL:
- <iframe src="CALENDAR URL" style="border: 0; width: 100%; height: 750px;"></iframe>
- Save the module and test putting it on desktops
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On Hold Items
- You may want to display on hold tickets to show work that is waiting for time or further action.
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Team Weekly Stats
- A helpful set of data and sometimes fun competition can be to show your teams weekly stats. You may want to show all the tickets closed in the last week. This is a good time to use a chart to break up the screen and give more depth to the data. Remember with chart reports you will typically want only 2-3 values returned. You may have a lot of filters to get the specific information but too many viewed values can make your chart not work. Here is a shot of how you might build a report like this:
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Annual Stats
- Another element you may want to consider is including annual stats. You might do something like total tickets closed or opened this year. This is another good place for a chart; remember to use limited values with a chart.
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SLA related reports
- SLAs are important to measure and keep up with. Creating sets of reports to show tickets that are close to or have broken SLAs can assist your team with keep an eye out for tickets that have slipped through and need attention.
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High Priority/VIPs
- You may want to consider reporting against specific priorities or VIP clients in your system
Assigning Desktops
Now that you have content and you are ready to provide it to your team you have 3 options on providing that information.
Your first option is to simply let your team know that the content is available. Make sure you set report visibility appropriately to allow it to be found. Your team members may now go to their desktop application at TDnext> Desktop Tab and create or edit their desktop to include the information you created. You may retain ownership/control of the modules and reports themselves but you will not be able to control their desktop design to force remove/add content.
If you would prefer to give them an entire desktop build you can also do that; you can also optionally retain control of the desktop design by going this route. This is especially helpful when you want to ensure your team is all using the same looking desktop. It does not prevent them from creating their own custom content as well.
To Assign a linked (locked) desktop see this article on Getting Started with Desktops
Gotchas and Pitfalls
- Remember when creating reports to set the visibility to allow the persons you want to share it with, either directly or on a desktop template, to be able to view it
- Reports can only be edited by those listed as "owner" on the report, this can be an individual or a group
- Don't overload the desktop with too much or make it hard to read; you can have multiple desktops for each person
- Don't feel like you have to get it perfect the first time, you may add/remove content as work develops
- Take advantage of even basic HTML modules to get extended value beyond just reports
- There are a number of helpful reports baked in to the system but you will likely find a lot of value in creating your own custom reports to fit you teams needs and processes
- Break up the content so it is not just grids stacked on grids, it can be hard to view too many grids
- Remember you can provide content in 3 forms
- Available content for others to use
- A pre-built desktop that can be edited and altered
- A linked desktop that can be shared by numerous people, editing is restricted to admins, and future changes will cascade to the all the users (LINKED DESKTOP)
- If working with the Maintenance Calendar tool in an iframe you will NOT want to use the calendar feed URL. Instead you will want to navigate to TDNext> Calendar> Feeds then click on the blue link name of the feed, not the blue "URL" link, to open a screen view of the ticket search calendar. Capture the URL from the browser window here. EXAMPLE: https://mydomain.teamdynamix.com/TDNext/Apps/123/Tickets/TicketCalendar?Search=11038