[rt-users] RT best practice

[Bob Goldstein]

>Hi everyone,
>
>Other than some final email configuration, my RT install is ready to go. I
>wonder if some of the RT gurus on the list would be willing to offer a
>suggestion or two about how to configure RT for my organization.
>
>I work for a fairly large school district (about 9,000 students K-12). We
>have 10 different schools plus a district office where we have several
>district-wide tech support people and network managers. Each of our schools
>has at least one dedicated tech support person.
>
>Most day to day tech support issues get handled by the tech support people
>in the schools. Occasionally they run into problems that need to be
>addressed by one of us at the district office. The district office staff
>work on network issues, servers, and the like.
>
>I have questions like:
>
>1. Should I have lots of queues with each building having its own complete
>set, duplicating queues in other buildings, or should I have relatively few
>with the building techs managing their own tickets within the larger queues?


   How do your techs like to work?  Do they want to see everything
   all the time, or just what they _need_ to see to get the
   work done?    If you have a lot of queues, you'll have to
   build more complicated queries to get an overall picture.
   But too few makes it harder to separate tickets.  How
   many outstanding tickets do you figure to have?  If you get
   20/day and usually resolve them quickly, you don't need
   many queues; if you get 200/day and many stick around, get
   more queues.


>
>2. A related question... Should I have lots of email address for our
>teachers to try to remember, or should we create a bare minimum and have our
>techs sort tickets as they come in?

   You did say most problems are resolved at the school level,
   and the tickets are escalated only occasionally.  So I'd
   suggest one queue and email per school plus one queue for escalation.
   That way the tickets are routed most quickly to the proper tech,
   and staff in each school have only one email address to remember.

   Also remember you can have CustomFields if you need to tag
   each ticket with specific info but don't want to increase queues.


>
>3. How could we use RT groups to better organizer our tickets?

    Groups are groups of people.  If you give privs to groups,
    then it is easy to add new people -- you just add them
    to the proper groups, rather than add a set of detailed
    privs to each person.


>
>4. Is it possible to create a queue that only one person could see and work
>on?

    I'm sure, but is this what you really want?  I'm an RT newbie
    myself, my above advice is based on how we work with other
    ticket systems.  But I'm trying to get us converted from Clarify
    to RT, and one of the things we don't particularly like about
    Clarify is the wipbin, really a personal queue.  The problem is
    that "assigning" a problem in Clarify means transfering it to
    the personal wipbin, in which case it is removed from the
    general queue.  So I, as a manager, have to go inspect everyone's
    personal wipbin to check status, rather than getting a single
    list of my queue contents.  In RT, ownership of a ticket and queue
    assignement are separate, and that makes lots more sense
    the way we work.  So if you want a personal queue to be
    a personal to-do list, fine.  But if you think a person
    will transfer a ticket out of a more general queue into his
    personal queue as a way of owning it, then it makes the
    manager's job a lot harder.
>
>Any ideas from the list would be appreciated.


    Start as simple as you can, and add features as you discover
    you need them.  We've never had a ticket system work "out of the box"
    because we never knew what we really wanted until we used it
    in production a little while.  Every ticket system and political
    organization has its quirks, and you just have to see how they
    mesh.

       bobg

>
>-Tim
>
>-- 
>Timothy Wilson
>Technology Integration Specialist
Hopkins ISD #270, Hopkins, MN, USA
>ph: 952.988.4103  fax: 952.988.4311  AIM: tis270
>
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