[rt-users] Adding more status types

[Michael S. Liebman]

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At 09:58 AM 6/22/2004, Kelly D. Lucas wrote:
>My group has been evaluating RT for 2 weeks now, and the only thing we've 
>found that will cause us implementation headaches is the rigid definitions 
>of the status field. I suspect that the status field is this way, because 
>alot of the logic flow of a ticket must be based on the status. Is this 
>assumption correct?

Pretty much. If you take a step back from the process you are working on, 
you will probably find the "status" of the process will fit into one of the 
broad categories of the ticket status.

>After the custom defined fields are added, then have a  U/I under 
>configuration for scrips.

You may want to have a look at Arturius's work flow based UI.

>Any thoughts? I guess at a minimum, I want a way to add or remove 
>statuses, and connect the logic flow to them.

I would recommend leaving the statuses the way they are and add a custom 
field for the specifics you want. For example, if you are trying to use RT 
for a provisioning work flow, you would create the ticket with the "new" 
status. This might be the first contact with the customer with regard to 
the service you are going to provision for them. The status would change to 
"open" when sales started working out the details. Your custom field would 
be set to "sales." Once things get worked out from there, the custom field 
would get set to "field operations" so the could actually go out and do the 
work. But the ticket status stays at "open." Once the service is 
provisioned, you would set the custom field to "billing" and again leave 
the status as "open."

It's not until billing sends out the invoice that you set the status to 
"stalled" to indicate you are waiting for a response from the customer. 
Your custom field is still set to "billing." That way you know that after x 
amount of time, billing needs to follow up to find out where their payment 
is. Additionally, you could set the status to "stalled" anywhere else in 
your work flow, say when your custom field is "sales," to indicate you are 
waiting on the customer. But this time you know it is sales that has to do 
the follow up. It shouldn't be too difficult to get scrip with custom 
conditions and actions and the cron tool to do what you need to based on 
the relation between the ticket status and your custom field.

Hope that helps.

Michael

-- 
Michael S. Liebman                      m-liebman at northwestern.edu
                 http://msl521.freeshell.org/
"I have vision and the rest of the world wears bifocals."
        -Paul Newman in "Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid"