Hi Jesse and the team,
May I first congratulate you all on a brilliant bit of software. I know
of a few ISP’s here in Australia that use it.
I have a few ideas that I wanted to run by you on uses of RT and how I
could implement them.
-
Use RT to store tickets against Clients.
Would I use a Queue or a Custom Field - or something else?
-
Export Client tickets somehow so it can be posted in the Client
Area on the web (different server to RT).
-
A friend of mine has been looking to include all the open
tickets on his corporate Intranet. He said the only way he could do it
was to use the command-line tool. Any ideas here also?
-
How could RT be used as managing a Project? i.e. would it be
better to store them in a separate queue? Has anyone done this? If an
email comes in from a known address - can we automatically put it in
another queue?
2 and 3 could be considered the same thing.
Many thanks,
Randal Adamson
- How could RT be used as managing a Project? i.e. would it be
better to store them in a separate queue? Has anyone done this? If an
email comes in from a known address - can we automatically put it in
another queue?
Indeed, a good topic. After spending months getting RT up and running and
getting the users all happy, now, higer management has decided they want
to get more of a “project management” type view on things. There are rumblings
about abandoning RT (which works great for a task tracking orientation) and
trying out tools like dotproject (www.dotproject.net) which give managers the
nice hierarchical view of tasks with time estimates/tracking etc that they
want but which nobody else cares about. However, since the decision has been
made we’re only going to use one task/project tracker, we can’t have the
engineers and programmers using RT and the managers using whatever they find.
Since the managers make the decision, that means we need to make them realize
RT is the better tool if we want to keep using it. I think it should be pretty
easy using RT’s existing features such as custom fields etc to give them
something more project flow oriented.
Some things they want RT does seem to lack though. You could for example set up
a custom field in each ticket in a project to put in estimated completion time.
You can use RT’s relationships to set higher level tickets as dependent on
subordinate tasks. However, Pointy Headed Manager cant go into RT and easily
click on a “project name” button, pull up a hierarchical (preferably graphical)
view of all tickets under that project, and see an overal top level “this project
has a total estimated completion time of…”
I can think of some ways to do this that would be rather code intensive, but
since managers all over tend to think alike I was wondering what other solutions
people in this situation have come up with.
Indeed, a good topic. After spending months getting RT up and running and
getting the users all happy, now, higer management has decided they want
to get more of a “project management” type view on things. There are rumblings
about abandoning RT (which works great for a task tracking orientation) and
trying out tools like dotproject (www.dotproject.net) which give managers the
nice hierarchical view of tasks with time estimates/tracking etc that they
want but which nobody else cares about. However, since the decision has been
made we’re only going to use one task/project tracker, we can’t have the
engineers and programmers using RT and the managers using whatever they find.
Since the managers make the decision, that means we need to make them realize
RT is the better tool if we want to keep using it. I think it should be pretty
easy using RT’s existing features such as custom fields etc to give them
something more project flow oriented.
We’ve done some speculative work on a hierarchical project managment
fronted for RT, as well as an experimental gantt-chartting tool.
Neither is anywhere near production ready, but both are available in the
subversion repository for RT 3.3. Basically, we’ve had a couple
customers who expressed interest in the functionality, had us spec it
and prototype it and then failed to come through with funding to have us
actually build it for them.
Some things they want RT does seem to lack though. You could for example set up
a custom field in each ticket in a project to put in estimated completion time.
That’s why we’ve got “Time Estimated” in RT 3.1.
You can use RT’s relationships to set higher level tickets as dependent on
subordinate tasks. However, Pointy Headed Manager cant go into RT and easily
click on a “project name” button, pull up a hierarchical (preferably graphical)
view of all tickets under that project, and see an overal top level “this project
has a total estimated completion time of…”
That would be a bit of logic to add for the project managment UI.
We’d be absolutely thrilled to build this tool for a customer if there’s
someone out there who’s interested.
Best,
Jesse