Working with Ticket Tasks

Overview

In this video, you will learn how to work with ticket tasks, including creating new tasks as well as reviewing, updating, and editing existing ones.

Learning Objectives

Test your knowledge by completing the following tasks in your own TeamDynamix environment.

• Create a ticket task on a ticket
• Apply a task template to a ticket
• Explore the differences between the Current Activities list and the Tasks/Activities tab on the ticket

Transcript

In this video, you will learn how to work with ticket tasks, including creating new tasks as well as reviewing, updating, and editing existing ones.

In many cases, a ticket may be created for a more complex piece of work, which requires a series of smaller steps be completed before the ticket can be closed. Similarly, there may be situations where multiple teams must complete different parts of the work that a ticket entails. In TeamDynamix, you can keep track of these smaller pieces of work within a ticket using ticket tasks or a ticket workflow.

In this session, we'll focus on ticket tasks. We'll cover ticket workflows in a separate session.

Ticket tasks represent the items one must complete as part of resolving a ticket. Ticket tasks can be standalone items or they can be arranged in a linear order so that one task must be completed before the next can begin.

For example, imagine a ticket comes in requesting a new computer. You may need the Desktop team to submit a requisition. Rather than creating a separate ticket, you can create a ticket task to that team. Creating tasks on a ticket allows us to keep all of the work items together so we can easily keep track of the work.

Let's create a ticket task on a ticket. First, we'll open a ticket. You can open a ticket by clicking its ID or Title, either from a desktop module or in the tickets home base in the ticketing application. In this case, we're going to click on a ticket in one of our desktop modules.

First, at the top of the ticket, we'll click Add, then, Task. A window will appear with information about our new task. The Title of the task provides the group with information about the task and will appear on the right side of the ticket. Like the Title of the ticket, we'll make sure the Title of the ticket task is descriptive.

We can set a Predecessor for this task. This would mean the task we're creating now won't become active until its Predecessor is complete. Note that the Predecessor must exist on this ticket for us to select it.

Optionally, you can set a Start Date and Due Date for this task, provide the Estimated Hours it would take to complete the task, and provide the number of hours that the task must be completed within.

Use the Responsible box to choose a person or group who will be responsible for completing this task. You can even assign the task to yourself if you intend to work on it in the future. Note that this field is not required and it is possible to leave the task unassigned. In our example, we'll set the Responsible field to the Desktop group.

We can provide additional information about the task in the Description box. This may include instructions or other contextual information. Note that the group who was assigned the task will have the ability to see the ticket details, so your description doesn't have to be exhaustive.

Finally, we'll click Save. The new task will show in the Current Activities box on the ticket.

In addition to creating ad hoc tasks, tasks can be organized into Task Templates, which enable you to add multiple tasks to a ticket at once. For example, a request to move someone from one office to another may have multiple tasks each time: one for Telecommunications for a phone setup, one for Networking to activate a data jack, and one for Service Desk to deploy a computer and so on.

Your TeamDynamix administrator can create a task template to collect and organize these tasks and even configure task templates to be applied automatically when certain tickets are created.

You can also manually assign task templates if the need arises. Let's apply a task template to this ticket. First, we'll click on Add at the top the ticket. Then, click Task Template. We'll use the dropdown box to choose which template to apply.

If there are existing tasks on the ticket, we have the option to remove all existing ticket tasks using the checkbox. This will replace any existing ticket tasks with the ones in our template.

If the tasks in the template have start dates on them, we can choose how to set their start dates: based on the current date and time, based on the time the service request was created, or based on the start date of the ticket. We'll choose the default, using the current date and time.

Finally, we'll click Save. All active ticket tasks will show in the Current Activities section of the ticket.

If any tasks have a predecessor that is not complete yet, they will not be active and won't show up in the Current Activities list. These can be found in the Tasks/Activities tab at the top of the ticket. We can click on the name of the task to view its details and interact with it.

From the ticket details page, we can click Update to change the percent complete, provide comments, and notify others. This is similar to providing a status update on a ticket except the status of a ticket task is measured in a percentage.

Back on the ticket details page, we can click Mark Complete to set the task's percentage complete to 100%. Note that using Mark Complete will not send any notifications to the requestor or those responsible for the task. To do so, it is suggested you update the task. Finally, you can click Edit to change the title, description, dates or task responsibility on the task.

Any changes you make to the task will be visible in the task's Feed at the bottom of the task window. Changes to any tasks will also appear in the Feed on the ticket.

Now you know how to create and work with ticket tasks. Explore the ticket task templates your organization has created and create a few ad hoc tasks of your own.