RT Essentials

Chapter 1. What Is Ticketing?

If your organization is anything like any of ours, there’s always a lot of stuff to do. Vendors need to get paid. Customers need to get invoiced. Staff need to do work for customers. Sales inquiries need to be answered. Bugs in hard- or software need to be fixed, and everyone needs to know that they have been fixed. Somebody needs to take out the garbage. And at the end of the day, you’ve got to know who wanted what, who did it, when it got done, and most importantly what remains undone.

That’s where a ticketing system comes in.

Why “Ticket”?

The convention is to call each request or piece of work a Ticket. When a new thing comes into the system, we give it a virtual slip of paper with a number, much like the ticket for checking your coat at the coat room or leaving your car in valet parking. This is the ticket we track.

A Dissected Ticketing System

Before we get into typical applications, let’s dissect a generic ticketing system into its component parts, by building a list of the things a typical ticketing system will do. You can use this list to decide whether or not you need a ticketing system.

These are the bones of a true ticketing system:

• Register an event or a ticket

• Assign an owner, or person responsible, to the ticket

• Assign additional interested parties to the ticket

• Track changes to the ticket

• Inform interested parties of these changes

• Launch activity based on ticket status and/or priority

• Report on status of one or more ticket(s)—an overview

• Finish ...