How does your service desk triage IRs from Portal only? (we don't give access to console)

Mark_Wahlert

Hi. Another process question I have, as it's always interesting hearing how others perform the same function.

Our issue is the Service Desk are very short staffed and are having difficulty identifying which IRs to focus on when triaging. We are a decent sized business, so their active queue is in the hundreds.

1.  We've trialled an IR form that is very simple, Details, Short Summary, attachment prompts.
2.  IRs default to Pri3
3. SD triage Pri3 IRs and update Priority, assign support group, etc.

SD have now requested a way to flag urgent IRs (VIPs, High Threat, etc), the danger of course is everyone might choose urgent. So we've decided to trial:

1. Add prompt to IR form for urgency (eg. 1. Very urgent. 2. Urgent. 3. Not urgent.) 1 & 2 will then show Justification and Manager for approval prompts. We use the unused 'Category' list for the 1, 2, 3, which also allows SD to group and sort IRs.
2. IR default priority remains at 3
3. Promote custom view for SD to use (SD could just filter/sort/group in ALL WORK)
4. SD team can now see the Category column in order to filter IRs that need more urgent triaging. Eg. Group "Urgent High Threat"

So we'll see how this works for us, but it's not ideal we've used Category (but a column to group/sort/filter is a requirement, rather than multiple mapping and sorting by Title), I'm told v6 might allow us to use a class extension but that brings with it many problems, especially for reporting.

If anyone has any other ideas, or approaches I'd welcome your input. Thanks.

Chris_Keander

I would avoid letting users choose their Urgency, as you've stated that they may always pick the most urgent offering.  Instead, give them an Impact picker where they can choose who is impacted by this incident (one user, multiple users, entire site, multiple sites)

Mark_Wahlert

Thanks Chris, unfortunately in our environment politics comes into play so impact of one user could be someone quite senior and in turn we have to respond quicker. Same applies for a threat to someone, service desk want to see this in the queue as opposed to opening each one to read the description. Also, manually adding to the title gets messy and still delays the response. I do agree with you however, it creates other problems when we give users the option to decide the urgency.

Mark_Wahlert

So the solution we've gone with for triage of incidents involves.

1. Needs Portal 6.03 - no cache so dashboard refreshes.
2. SQL table widget
3. Class extension created for TRIAGE field in IR
4. SQL code connects to Service Manager DB for the new class extension
5. IR form updated to include - Urgency = TRIAGE (1, 2, 3), IF 2 & 3, a supervisor approval and Justification.
6. Add Dashboard to display the SQL table bar chart of the TRIAGE. And the Queue list below of the IRs grouped by TRIAGE (1, 2, 3)

This lets end users feel more empowered, and gives the service desk a better way to sort/manage more urgent incidents.