Automating ITSM Ticket Assignments
We are in the early stages of planning for implementing ITSM. One of the questions that has come up is about how tickets can be auto-assigned to Service Desk technicians. Our current software allows a round-robin distribution of tickets to members of specified teams. We can control the logic for this method to balance workload and ticket priority across teams. Team managers are able to temporarily remove a technician from the pool if they are out for the day. Can we configure TeamDynamix Ticketing Apps similarly or would this be something that would require external development?
Answers (3)
Hi Lena,
You are currently unable to automatically exclude users from ticket assignment based upon time off/calendar entries. To prevent these technicians from being assigned, the simplest thing would be to assign to the group initially and then have another user assign to the appropriate technician.
In addition, you could also use Ticket Workflows to make this assignment process easier. You could use an Approval step with an approval mode of Any and set the technician group as the approver. Although the group would be marked as responsible instead of a specific user, any of the technicians in that group could approve the step for the workflow to advance.
If you would still like to automate this process, perhaps you could add a Web Service step that determined if a given user was working that day and handle the response appropriately. However, this type of workflow configuration is more complex. If you would like further explanation of this step or any others, I recommend our Types of Ticketing Workflow Steps knowledge base article.
I hope this helps to explain the limitations with automated ticket assignment and time off entries. In addition, hopefully the ticket workflow configuration above would work for your organization. Please let me know if you would like additional clarification or there's anything else I can do for you.
Sincerely,
Jamey Stock
TeamDynamix
Hi Jamey,
I'm able to use ticketing rules to assign tickets with certain criteria to a ticketing group, yes. Where I'm struggling is how to assign those automatically to members of the ticketing group. Could this be done by creating an action and workflow that will distribute the tickets? And more importantly, how can I make it so that if a Service Desk member is on vacation, we can temporarily exclude them from receiving ticket assignments. I don't see a way to build out criteria based on time off entries or calendar data.
Thanks for your help!
Lena McLain
Hi Lena,
This sounds like a good candidate for Ticket Automation Rules, which is a feature that was released as a part of version 9.3. With this feature, you are able to configure rules that match on certain ticket attributes for each ticketing platform.
When a ticket is created, the rules will be checked against the values that were provided on the ticket. The rule(s) which match the values provided on the ticket will cause automation actions to be carried out against the ticket. You are able to configure these Automation Actions for each rule, and these support actions such as ticket assignment and changing priority.
I hope this helps to explain how you can achieve this type of ticketing automation in the TeamDynamix system. More information on this feature can be viewed in the 9.3 Release document on our Community site. If you have any further questions on how this feature works or we can do anything else for you, please let us know.
Sincerely,
Jamey Stock
TeamDynamix