Thank you all so much for taking time out of your busy schedules to attend our recent webinar! We hope you found it informative. If your company is interested in gaining a deeper understanding of this topic, GWI Software does offer two related training courses on the topic of Hierarchy Templates. Contact a GWI Software Account Manager for more information or to schedule a course time. (Sales@gwi.com)
Here are the combined Q&A sessions from the two webinars. Many great questions were submitted on both days so we figured everyone would benefit from seeing them all.
Q. when you add a subcategory when creating a template, you mentioned that for example sub1-a can be worked on before you can work on sub1. So task sub 1-a has to be completed before task sub 1 can be worked on?
A. Yes, a ticket that is dependent upon a sub ticket won't be created until the sub-ticket has been closed.
Q. When will custom fields be able to propagate down from the parent ticket?
A. Custom fields do propagate down on change requests and also on incident hierarchies that are created by support representatives. In the next release the custom fields will propagate on incident hierarchies that created via end user desktops as well.
Q. When using the Hierarchy Templates, if the parent work order (Employee Termination) has an attachment, will the subsequent tickets (Step 1 - 6) have the attachment also?
A. No, the attachments would have to be manually copied to the child records or the assignee's of the child records would have to use the link the parent record that displays in the related hierarchy section of their record to access the attachment on the parent record.
Q. The hierarchy templates are created by your company or we need to create them ourselves
A. You would need to define your own hierarchy templates. We do offer training and consulting if assistance is needed.
Q. Is there a way to schedule a task for a future date?
A. Scheduled incidents tickets can be created, but not within a hierarchy.
Q. If you create sub tickets under different sub tickets are the higher tickets relying on this sub tickets?
A. Yes, the ticket that is highlighted when the add or add existing link is selected the highlighted ticket becomes a parent ticket to the new one that is added and will become dependent to the new child ticket. The parent ticket will not be created until the sub ticket is closed.
Q. Does the dependency work the same as sub ticket?
A. Not clear on the question, but I hope the answer above helps.
Q. If we send notifications to the user that a ticket has been created, does the user only get one notification for the parent ticket only?
A. Notifications on each ticket or change request within a hierarchy on determined by the applicable SLA. The child tickets could be associated with custom SLAs that include or exclude the customer notifications.
Q. Can change management tickets be linked to incident tickets and vice versa?
A. Yes, Change requests and incident tickets can be associated (linked).
Q. How do you track projects? Is this through categories?
A. Please feel free to call or email us if you like to discuss this as it's not clear what regarding project tracking you are referring to from this question. If you just want to track the type of projects you are managing categories should work very well, but depending on your needs other features such as custom fields and status', change hierarchies, etc. may be beneficial as well.
Q. Due Date Interval Implies that the SLA is defined in calendar days. Does this interval override an existing SLA or is it to be used in place of an SLA? Advanced Tab > Due Date Interval
A. The due, implementation, and review dates are additional date fields with associated notifications. They will not affect the SLA time limits and notifications at all. The incident ticket only has SLA time limits and notifications where the change request has both SLA and due, implementation, and review dates and notifications.
Q. From a reporting standpoint, is the status of the H.Template reported (as blown SLA or made SLA) or do all of the subtasks get reported with respect to the SLA status of each individual task. This can mess up reporting.
A. If the child records have SLAs with time limits defined they will be included in the SLA reporting. If the child tickets are associated with SLAs that don't set time limits they will be excluded from the SLA reports. When defining custom reports the child tickets could be excluded from SLA reports even if their associated SLAs included time limits.
Q. Does load balancing consider both assigned incidents and change tickets?
A. No, the load balancing only considers the same ticket of work item that is being assigned. Good feature request that we'll submit to our development team.
Q. Can sub tasks be edited simultaneously? Different people work on different tasks that are some times independent of other tasks but part of the overall request?
A. Yes, as long as the tickets have been open.
Q. Can hierarchies be nested? If I have an existing hierarchy defined, can I make that a child of a new process?
A. Existing hierarchies can be copied and pasted into another hierarchy template by using the Add Existing and Insert Existing options, but once copied they would be new records so any edits that need to apply to both copies would have to be manually applied to all copies. It is also possible to use more that one hierarchy template when creating an incident or a change hierarchy. For example, a staff member could create an incident or change template and then select a hierarchy template to create the core tasks to a process. The tech could then use the new related incident or change link from one of the tickets within the hierarchy they just created and then select another hierarchy template to extend the hierarchy with the additional tasks.
Q. Can each template linked to a Company?
A. Not sure exactly what you're asking for here so please feel free to call or email if you'd like to discuss. Templates can't be associated with a particular customer and/or company, but if you wanted to create template that designed to structure a work flow for a specific customer/company and let your techs or an email rule chose the right template based upon the customer/company you could do that.
Thanks again to everyone that attended the webinar.
Eric & Darren