When bringing an entire organization onto a singular helpdesk software, it can be difficult meeting the needs of all the different departments while also creating a setup that works for everyone. Especially when departments operate mostly separately from each other, but do need to work together sometimes, it raises concerns about permissions and workflows. For organizations that are public entities, there is also often a duality faced when considering who their customers or patrons are, whether they are internal staff or external users. While both types of patrons need to be considered, the different natures need to still be respected. One client in the public sector came to us seeking unification as they started to look at growing their interactions with patrons beyond their existing internal operations.

Our client is a municipal public library whose staff is divided into multiple different departments. Each of these departments gets incoming requests, and though they are often for internal support, they’d also like to extend these requests to external users. Although each of these departments functions fairly independently, there are occasions when teams must work together. This raises some concerns for our client as they’d like to have teams mostly focused on their own work, but also able to be part of multi-team efforts. Along with needing a helpdesk to handle ticketing, they voiced a desire to have a tool for asset management as well.

Organizing work for each department

Our client noted that they have departments for IT, marketing, facilities, tech services, and more. As these departments all work independent of one another, it raised the question of how all their work could be tracked in OneDesk without giving everyone full reign over everyone else’s work. First off, we began to relate our hierarchical structure for work to their different departments. By using portfolios to represent the departments, they can then have projects and folders to group work under each portfolio. For example, our client outlined how every department provides a certain level of support to people outside their team. In order to differentiate what work is project work versus support work, we recommended that every portfolio have a project where support work can be placed. This clearly differentiates between the different types of work. Permissions can then be set for individual users and teams based on these groupings, limiting each department to solely the portfolio that contains all of their work. In cases where team members might be specialized in support work for their department, permissions can even be tuned to focus their view to just the support project within a portfolio. For those times when inter-departmental work needs to happen, it’s just a matter of tuning permissions such that those involved with the work can view and interact with the corresponding tickets.

Separating incoming work based on team

Once the structure of work has been defined in OneDesk, it only follows that work now needs to come in and be directed to the right people. But what about the process of sorting the work? With so many different departments, it can seem daunting to think that someone has to triage every incoming ticket and move it to the correct portfolio and project. By using workflow automations, incoming work can be easily sorted in OneDesk without any manual intervention. We advised our client to set up a different ticket type for every department so they would have marketing tickets, IT tickets, facilities tickets, and tech services tickets. Every ticket type in OneDesk automatically gets its own intake e-mail address, which means that any e-mails sent to these addresses are created in OneDesk and typed according to whichever corresponding e-mail address the request was sent to. From here, our client can set a workflow automation to trigger whenever a new ticket is created. Based on certain aspects of the ticket – such as its type – the workflow automation can then move the ticket into the proper portfolio and even project. Workflow automations can get quite sophisticated as well, even assigning tickets to people or teams automatically based on specific criteria.

Supporting both internal staff and external users

One feature that intrigued our client was our knowledge base application. Based on our customer portal application, our knowledge base allows clients to publish articles to it that external users can then view. While this is a great way for our client to provide easy answers to frequently asked questions, they noted that external interactions are an area which they have not spent as much time developing. They wanted a way to support internal staff, as well. Luckily we’ve thought of that at OneDesk, and our client is able to have multiple knowledge bases – one for external users, and one for their internal staff. By setting a configuration on their knowledge base applications, they can limit access to the internal knowledge base to just their own staff. Beyond having a knowledge base, our client was also interested in the messenger application which they can embed on their website via a widget. The messenger allows them to provide real-time support with users that want to chat with them. This application also complements the knowledge base quite well as our client is able to set canned responses that can be used to answer common questions. Once conversations are over, they can still be referred back to if our client needs to follow up. Tickets can be easily created from messenger conversations with the click of a button.

Managing assets with OneDesk’s existing functionality

On the surface, it doesn’t seem like OneDesk’s project management or helpdesk tools lend themselves to asset management. Although asset management is not one of our primary functionalities, we have served as an asset management tool for clients in the past, and as this client found, the power is in OneDesk’s flexibility as a product. At its heart, OneDesk provides a framework for management – whether our clients use it for managing work or assets is up to them. This breadth of possibility stems from the ability to define ticket types, each with their own workflows and fields. While tickets and tasks are the basic designations that OneDesk provides out of the box, up to 10 different ticket types can be created and named to match whatever suits our client’s needs. In this case, our client made a ticket type called “assets” and customized the corresponding workflow to match the various statuses assets can be in. As our client’s primary assets are IT equipment, they then removed the fields that related to tickets and work, and replaced them with fields to capture information about who was currently using the asset, current technical specifications, and access information.

From managing work to managing assets, OneDesk proves through its flexibility that it is an all-in-one solution. It doesn’t matter how disparate the work is, or how interdependent it is between departments, OneDesk can be easily configured to work in all cases. With additional applications like our customer portal, knowledge base, and messenger, our client is able to be more interactive with their users. When it comes to streamlining processes, our workflow automations are easy to set up, and can be used to reduce most of the administrative overhead that comes with managing work. Although project management and helpdesk are our main areas of focus, it’s clear that anything can be tracked and managed in OneDesk with a little bit of tweaking.