[rt-users] A ticket's life through multiple queues

[Tim Cutts]

On 18 Sep 2012, at 14:17, Giuseppe Sollazzo <gsollazz at sgul.ac.uk> wrote:

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> Hi everyone,
> I have a little "philosophical" doubt about RT, so to say.
> 
> In my institutions, we have several groups, most of which have their own
> queue set. They mostly work on their queues, but occasionally need to
> transfer the ticket under another queue. In some cases, a ticket need to
> pass through 3-4 queues.
> 
> My questions...
> 
> Is this a common scenario?

Yes.

> How do other institutions deal with this kind of issues?

With difficulty, I think.  :-)

> For statistical purposes, do you assign the ticket to a given queue
> before closing it?

As you've noticed, passing tickets between queues makes it very difficult to measure how much time was spent by each person on  the ticket, making your performance metrics pretty meaningless.

I think the orthodox argument goes like this:

If the task actually requires multiple people to work on it, then it isn't a single task.  It's multiple tasks.

So, you spawn dependent tickets of the current ticket in the appropriate queues, each containing one of the sub-tasks, and only resolve the parent ticket when those are completed.   This is a bit more work, but it makes your results measurable.  If you want to measure how fast the end user got their request resolved, than you compile stats based on the parent tickets, but you now have individual tickets in other queues which you can perform stats on to identify how well those queues are working.  You also can now have different owners for the different aspects of the work, so you have a better view of who's responsible for what.

Ruslan's SpawnLinkedTicketInQueue extension can be useful for this:

http://search.cpan.org/~ruz/RT-Extension-SpawnLinkedTicketInQueue-0.05/lib/RT/Extension/SpawnLinkedTicketInQueue.pm

and if the sub-units of work are predictable, you can even generate the sub-tickets with Scrips, in theory, although I've never gone that far.

Regards,

Tim

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