calendar of planned changes
Sometimes our customers open tickets that result in a need to
install new software. We schedule that installation with the customer,
and typically need to leave the ticket open several days afterwards to
allow for the discovery of unexpected side-effects.
Problem: It is challenging to keep track of all of these
scheduled changes. We're tried putting them in an external calendar, but
it's very easy to forget, and it's disconnected from the Jitbit ticket.
Proposed solution: New feature: A change calendar (or event
calendar? -- maybe custom name on the field so that it makes sense to
more of Jitbit's customers). A new field on each ticket allows entry of a
date/time when a change is scheduled to occur. If this field has a
value, the ticket will appear on a change calendar report with the
ticket linked appearing at the scheduled date/time.
The way it'd hopefully all work would go something like this:
1) Technician adds a change date to an open ticket
2) Under reports, new report called change calendar (or similar). The change
calendar shows all scheduled changes for all categories/customers that you have
rights to see (so admin sees them all, technician sees them for their
assigned categories, customer sees them just for their own company)
3) Automation rule to update a ticket (therefore emailing all
ticket subscribers) X hours/days before a scheduled change. Email can be
sent with template tags just like other automation rules.
The change date would not be the same as the ticket close date or
due date, since the change would happen some days prior to the ticket
being due or closed.
Since it's possible that a ticket with a change would end up
requiring a 2nd or 3rd change (hopefully not, but you know how it goes)
Ideally it would be possible to have more than one scheduled change per
ticket, but the more I think about it the more it seems that'd be a pain
to implement.
I'm not sure how the calendar would show two installs on the same
date/time, but since ticket titles can be long, maybe the calendar lists
just the company or category name, then the mouseover expands to the
full ticket title?
If you built this feature, then I can see this additional report being very handy:
* list of all changes, filter by date, by technician, by customer (just like advanced ticket search)