Jitbit Helpdesk - calendar of planned changes : Ideas forum

New Suggested 3/19/2020 by Jared Call

5

votes

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)