The inability for a user to be a member of more than one skill group is a severe limitation on the effective management of a multi customer multi skill team.  The requirement for the queue manager to be a member of the skill group and being limited to being a member of only one skill group means that I cannot have service level managers managing multiple queues. 

When setting up a user I would like to be able to select which skill groups they are members of to provide flexibility in the management of teams.

Hi John, thanks for the suggestion.

Staff belonging to multiple skillgroups is a popular idea. Currently HelpMaster Pro only allows staff members to belong to one skillgroup, and the current architecture of HelpMaster Pro has been designed around this premise, so changing it would be an involved task. I would be very interested to hear how other people feel about this, and hear any ideas about how you might see such a feature implemented in HelpMaster Pro.

Here's some initial thoughts on having staff belonging to multiple skillgroups.

1. Currently HMP tracks the Skillgroup that a staff member belongs to whenever they log a job, close a job or simple action a job. If the staff member belongs to multiple skillgroups, then we lose the precision on which "Skillgroup" did the work. This affects the Field Chooser columns, reporting, the Job Finder etc.

2. The Helpdesk Explorer may get a little crowded if you expand the Skillgroups section. You would see the same staff member appear under each skillgroup in which they belong. I guess that the point really. Not really a big issue here.

3. Belonging to multiple skillgroups would give visibility into a much wider range of jobs. Currently you can limit the visibility of a staff member to only the skillgroup to which they belong. If staff belong to multiple skillgroups, then they'll be able to see a lot more.

I'm wondering if visibility of jobs is the main issue here, or is it something else? Anyone else?

Best regards,

Rod

Today I tried to solve a problem using a new skillgroup, here's what I found...

We recently implemented a new email filtering system, and asked our clients to forward any spam emails not blocked to our IT inbox, duly sucked up by HMP e-mail manager, so we can do some tuning/analysis. We expected an early rise in the number of jobs this generates, and our clients do not expect a response to these jobs, only for the volume of spam to decrease!

We currently have one skill group set up, and the jobs land in the unassigned bucked. We want to ship these jobs somewhere so they can be trawled in a group fashion. For example selecting a whole bunch of jobs and doing an add-action to them all, nicely shipping them out of unassigned, trawled for clues, then closed. I wanted to avoid each staff member acknowledging and assigning to themselves, hoping it would be easier to manage. Could use job searching or reporting based on the job issue to do this, but each job would need to be actioned individually, and didn't seem neat, some thoughts around this at the end.

Tried a fake skill group first:
Set up a new skill group [name of new system], created an action-template that would assign them to the skill group. On the desktop system under the 'option' in helpdesk explorer, added the option to view the new skill group. The jobs are there in the the new skill group under 'open jobs' but so are all the other open jobs from the other skill group. Could toggle the skill groups under options, but not really ideal. 

Scrapped the fake skill group, and created a new staff member in our original skill group: 
Simple really, new staff member with a name of the new system, created an aciton-template that assignes the jobs to the staff member, everone can have a look at the jobs under the other people pane. Allows us to see per day how many emails have been sent by clients. This is what we're using..

Quickest fix I know of, any ideas?

Also prompted me to think if there is a way to bulk assign a job to an issue, as ours are initially set to a standard code 'unallocated' we set up for jobs that the HMP email filter isn't going to try and work out what type of issue it is. I'd like to be able to do that during the action-template we're using to move to the fake staff member.

Hi Peter,

Thanks for the post.  Sounds like you're really workin' the system.  Spam control is a worthy endevour, and a really great use of the Email Manager.

The "fake staff member" is one good approach.  It offers separation, visibility and good for reporting.  It also allows you to control who can see the queue, by the fact that this person must also belong to a skillgroup, which in turn has visibility rights.  There are many clients using HelpMaster Pro that also use the "fake staff member" to isolate job queues and control visibility.  We use it here ourselves extensively.

I think you've hit upon one of the best solutions.  An alternative may be to create "Saved searches" to expose the jobs in this category.

In order to make this effective, you will need to do the following:

1. You'll need to a way to uniquely identify these jobs.  You could do this via
   • Job type code
   • Issue code
   • Who they are assigned to (your current implementation)
   • Keywords
   • Custom code
   • Client that they are logged by
2. Set up a "Saved search" that will target these jobs
3. Get each person to also use this saved search.

A benefit of having some sort of unique identifier is that you can then use this identifier in Priority Manager profiles.  You can use the Priority Manager to "look for" jobs that match a particular criteria and then do something with them.  The Priority Manager can execute custom SQL, which can be used to bulk re-classify jobs to another code (or reassign, action etc).

One of the ideas we've come up with as a future feature would be to have the action screen be able to do more to the underlying job upon completion.  One possibility would be to execute a custom script - either VB script or SQL, or possibly some sort of "HelpMaster Pro script".  This script could be written so that it will do anything to a job, or possibly other entities whenever the action is completed.  Thus, when you use an action template of a particular sort, it may be configured to do the following:

1. Reassign the job
2. Change the status
3. Add notes
4. Update custom fields on the job
5. Change the Issue classification of the job
6. ...or anything else a script or SQL can do

Is this getting close to what you have in mind?

A while ago I posted some information about bulk re-classifying jobs via SQL.  Check it out here.

http://www.helpmasterpro.com/Community/DiscussionBoard/tabid/118/forumid/10/postid/55/view/topic/Default.aspx

Let us know how you go.

Best regards,

Rod

Tried to bulk update the job issue using sql, all looked good until every job has been update, even though I checked using the helpdesk job finder that the correct jobs would be updated. Perhaps I missed somthing.

In light I think the feature to update issue in bulk as an option in the Priority Manager would be good!

Hi Rod,

Ah yes, step 1 read the manual!  I didn't use: Where tblHelpdeskJobs.PKID = <>

I took on face value the meaning of wording under: Priority schedule > Actions to perform: "Execute this SQL, for each job found", presumed it would use the update sql on jobs retrieved in the 'Priority definition', not all jobs retrieved by the sql.

So to be sure, if I entered: update tblhelpdeskjobs set issuelink = 456 where tblHelpdeskJobs.PKID = <> I'd be dandy, it'll use the job tag to associate with what is retireved on the priority definition.