Time reporting on Work Orders or help desk tickets

[Michael Brown]

Community - i'm looking for some best practices and/or suggestions on add-on
tools you may have used to handle "Work Orders" or "Help desk tickets" in
your project server environment.

We've gone back and forth in our implementation for some time and i'm still
looking for the 'right' solution.

Today, we use "Quality center" to keep track of work orders as they come
into the department. Our customers open on average 30-40 tickets per day.
We're looking for a simple way for people to report time against each work
ticket, as well as provide an estimate of effort required.

Initially, we set up each work ticket as a "task" in a plan, but the time
required to add the task, assign the resources, enter the estimates,
republish the plans, etc., often exceeded the time it took to get the work
done. in addition, it created a huge volume of 'tasks' on folks "My task"
page.

has anyone solved this mystery? Are you using a 3rd party add-in? Any
suggestions are appreciated!

 

[Andrew Lavinsky]

You can pretty much do it the way you describe with the results you describe.
IMHO, MOPS has never been a good service desk tool if you need to create
trouble tickets, and then track time against them.

There are a number of help desk products out there depending on your need
and budget. The simplest is just to roll out a homegrown database. Bear
in mind that Help Desk best practice usually implies that you would need
some sort of relational database to track Incidents, Problems, etc. Depending
on where you're located, you may want to reach out to the local chapter of
Help Desk Institute (if they still exist, I remember hearing something about
them) and/or the IT Service Management Forum (ITSMF) for a read on what other
folks in your area are using.

That being said, there're a number of tools which will put a new timesheet
UI on top of both a help desk and MOPS - thus giving your folks one point
of entry which then divvies up the time between projects and whatever backend
database has been configured. I've seen HMS TimeControl which is pretty
slick - but may not be appropriate for your needs.

-A

 

[Gary L. Chefetz]

Michael:

You *can* do this, but it requires custom development.

--
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Gary L. Chefetz, MVP
MSProjectExperts
Project Server Consulting: http://www.msprojectexperts.com
Project Server Training: http://www.projectservertraining.com
Project Server FAQS: http://www.projectserverexperts.com
Project Server Help Blog: http://www.projectserverhelp.com

 

[Michael Brown]

Yup - figured that might be the approach. I was curious if anyone had any
experience with any 3rd party add-ons as well.
Thx gary

 

[Gary L. Chefetz]

Michael:

I haven't heard of any third-party off the shelf products for this as the
requirements vary widely from company to company. Getting the data into
Project Server is really the easy part. The more difficult challenge is
managing the workflow within the system as this requires an "ever green"
schedule strategy and some imposed workflow to move these tasks in and out
of the evergreen schedule. We have developed solutions like this for clients
in the past. If I thought it was something we could bottle up and sell, I'd
do it in a heart beat.

--
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Gary L. Chefetz, MVP
MSProjectExperts
Project Server Consulting: http://www.msprojectexperts.com
Project Server Training: http://www.projectservertraining.com
Project Server FAQS: http://www.projectserverexperts.com
Project Server Help Blog: http://www.projectserverhelp.com