I am aware there are complementary tools ie: Dashboard Designer, Form Designer to enhance the functionality of the helpdesk tool. As it is easy to get lost in translation between what could be achieved using what I will expose our need below:
We would need to track the time spent in the resolution of tickets (form creation to close) based on the different categories (Question, Incident, Problem, Request)
How can we achieve this and which tools and customisations we’ll need if any?
Thanks,
VB
Actually, we have an article which covers the time tracking case.
Could you please clarify the part about the spent time based on the different categories?
Do you want maybe to display them as a chart (e.g. time spent diveded by the categories)?
Dear Val,
It depends on what you mean by time spent. Do you mean overall time? Then, you could go to List Settings for Tickets List and click Create column -> call it TimeSpent (no spaces) -> Calculated (calculation based on other columns) with formula:
Select The data type returned from this formula is: Number (1, 1.0, 100)
This will create a new field which will calculate amount of hours spent per ticket.
You can use Dashboard Designer to build charts and aggregate charts by Category. Then you can create field either by sum of TimeSpent or by average value per Category. It can be displayed as a bar chart or a pie chart, for example. The app has a free trial period, so you can install it and build the chart to make sure that it works for you, before making the decision about purchase.
If you have any questions on how to do any of what I described in detail - feel free to ask, we would be glad to answer them!
Ok, thanks very much for your reply. TimeSpent or by average value per Category seems ok. I will discuss this testing this in trial version with my team and probably may come back with some questions at the time of setting this up.
Thanks again for your useful answers.
Regards,
Val
Hello Nikita,
I had tried to follow your instructions to crate a TimeSpent column in helpdesk.
could you confirm it is correctly configured? I do not see any values displaying. Is this normal?
Dear ValB,
You do not need Forms Designer for this method to work, but it will only work for Resolved tickets, not the ones in progress. If you want it to work with fields in progress as well (or only with them) - let us know, we’ll update the code for you!
Thanks for your reply. I’ll go back and check on the all tickets view to see if I see somethig showing on resolved tickets, However whant you propose seems quite interesting as well. I suppose putting a ticket in pendng status will stop the clock?
Regards,
Valeria
If we speak about SLA feature, then it considers only time when ticket is in New, In Progress states. You can see more information here.
But if we speak about suggestion made by @Nikita_Kurguzov. It considers only absolute time difference, because it uses simple SharePoint calculated field to get it.
You actually can get information that is used by SLAs. Just navigate to Ticket list settings, open “Metadata” field. It is a lookup to a separate list with ticket metadata (/lists/TicketMetadata). We record there some service information about ticket changes including SLA metrics. You can add one of them to be displayed in the ticket form:
Note: Those changes are service fields. We may change them in some of the feature releases.
