Ticket on hold waiting for a task to be done - but task not in My Assignments

If we have a ticket where we are waiting on someone to complete a task, but want to put it on hold to avoid violating an SLA, then that task assignment won't show to that person under their assignments (because tasks that are children of tickets on hold do not show there).

Do tasks interact with SLAs in any way? What is the right way to think about this? Address it?

Asked by David Tod on Thu 7/6/23 2:22 PM
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Answer (1)

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Mark Sayers Thu 7/6/23 2:56 PM

Hi David,

A task doesn't associate with an SLA in any way. Even if the task has a "complete within" value on it, the SLA of the overall ticket is not affected by the task.

The My Work > My Assignments page states the following in the Help window:
~~~
This page shows items which are currently active, assigned to you and not currently in your My Work list. Active means that the item is not complete and it either has no dates or should have started by today.

Please note that only tickets with a status class of New or In Process and which are not converted to project tasks will be included in the results. Ticket tasks will similarly be included only if their parent ticket has a status class of New or In Process and is not converted to a project task.
~~~

 

Sincerely,

Mark Sayers

Sr Support Consultant, CS

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So if a ticket is on hold and someone has a task on that ticket, there's no default way for them to know that?

A simple scenario might be that I'm waiting on someone to approve something, so they have an approval task, but it's on hold, because I'm waiting on them to approve it, but they don't see the approval task due to the ticket status. If I don't put the ticket on hold, the SLA might get violated, but also how do I report on that kind of status?

I suspect the answer is to not do it that way, but I'm not seeing what the right way is to do it. We have people who want to use "on hold" statuses for this kind of thing, and I'm not clear on what the alternative is given that tasks are less visible when you do that. - David Tod Thu 7/6/23 3:39 PM
Not per that page, no. If you're talking about *only* ticket tasks, and not workflow related/assigned steps, they/you could use a ticket task report with appropriate filtering to view those items on your/their desktop application. - Mark Sayers Thu 7/6/23 3:46 PM
The default "Awaiting my approval" report includes tasks for tickets on hold, but it doesn't have a desktop module!

Is that right?! - David Tod Mon 7/10/23 10:05 AM
I double checked and that appears to be correct. - Mark Sayers Mon 7/10/23 10:18 AM
Thanks. I created a custom version of "Awaiting My Approval" using "Workflow Step Resp" = Current User plus Ticket classes of New, In Process, and On Hold, and interestingly, it includes ones assigned to groups that I'm a member of, which the default report does not.

Unfortunately, it does not include tasks assigned to me, and I don't see a way to have both on the same report, since the former is a Ticket report. - David Tod Mon 7/10/23 10:41 AM
A ticket report wouldn't explicitly return the tasks that you might be assigned to, that is correct. The standard report is baked in so it has some abilities to cross report on both types of items that custom reports cannot do. - Mark Sayers Mon 7/10/23 10:57 AM
The standard report does not include tasks either, only workflow assignments, and it does not include group assignments. My ticket report is the one that includes group workflow assignments. It's the default one that does not. - David Tod Mon 7/10/23 11:05 AM
I'm a bit tangled up here, which is my own fault. My Approvals (both the desktop module and under Work) does what "Awaiting my approval" does not. It does not overlap with My Assignments.

I think the issue is in part that I did not understand that an Approval is not a Task and should be treated entirely separately. - David Tod Mon 7/10/23 1:17 PM
Ah that would be correct, and approval is specifically for things that must be approved as an approval type step (or a Choice step as that is built similar to an Approval step). My Assignments would be anything that is not an approval that is assignable. - Mark Sayers Mon 7/10/23 1:19 PM