Do you have to choose or change the help desk or ticket management system? 

Here are the focus points to consider, based on our experience.

1) Not only for SAP

In a company a ticketing system for managing user support, should ideally handle all requests (of the various systems or services involved).

The use of mailboxes should, if possible, be abandoned for several reasons, see next sections.  

What are the focus points that we have detected using, for our services (AMS Security SAP) (AMS Security SAP) dozens of types of ticketing and service management systems, in addition to our corporate system?  

2) SLA Service Level Agreements

It's essential, especially if a certain process is outsourced, to define reliable SLAs that can be checked/verified in the system (from both sides, customers and suppliers) 

SLA are also often included in AMS contracts (AMS application management services) and penalties are provided for non-compliance.  

3)  Possibility of holding

It seems obvious, but often it is not. It happens frequently, in the ordinary management of requests, to solve an alert (a call or a ticket) it is necessary to ask for information from other work teams (while remaining the owner of the request). 

The possibility to "pause" a request allows therefore not to exceed the planned SLA and to inform the system/client that we are waiting for information. 

But instead, if it were not possible to understand the requests while waiting for information, the letters would all be outside SLA, and it would become difficult to understand the actual working situation, if not analyzing one by one. 

4) Send traced communications (without using mail) 

During the management of a request you may have to ask for further information from the person who created it or from other persons. 

Every iteration that happens on the ticket should be traced. This is especially when there are more people in the back office who handle requests. 

It is therefore essential to ensure that these requests for information are traced in the tool (through internal chat or through internal mail system), if possible, by email notification. In fact, you are not always connected to the ticketing system to see the changes of state. 

5) Types of tickets

There are several reasons to classify well the requests, for example: 

• Statistical Reasons
• Reasons for economic "accounting" and effort 

If the average duration is assessed for each request, any improvement actions can be identified in the process. 

If for every request I have a "token" that is paid, you could get a contract by ticket type compared to other scenarios (for example forfeit or general consumption) 

6) Specific Tails 

Better a single queue in the ticket system or different?  If possible, from our advice, is better specific queues with dedicated teams. Although it is easier from the user side to have a single classification, it might be more complicated for those who have to handle every request.  

If no specific team is available to sort alerts to teams of expertise, it is important to define queues (according to the opening criteria for alerts) useful to channel support requests to the correct work team. 

7) Hypothesize delegating certain functions to externals

If the support service for requests today is completely internal, doesn't mean that it will always be so. 

Often to lighten the operational load, moving internal resources towards control and governance, some processes are outsourced. 

In this case assuming at the beginning a support service designed to be easily outsourced in the future, it can be a simplification when choosing the type of support and taking-over. 

8) Ticket and sub ticket

It happens that the completion of a request is subject to different team activities. 

Where there is no Identity Management System, for example, the creation of a user on the various SAP and non-SAP systems could be operationally carried out by different work teams against the same ticket.

It therefore becomes useful to imagine scenarios where a ticket is divided into sub-tickets and only when all these are completed, the process officially closes towards the applicant.

9) Approvals

Requests are approved by default or there is an approval process. It is useful to envisage, perhaps not for all scenarios, an approval process.

10) Ticket system or IDM?

It can happen to confuse a ticketing tool with a corporate Identity Management System.

If some IDM tools are present in the company it is important that they are used to request or remove authorizations.

Article has been translated from: 10 suggerimenti per il ticket management system