"If, for the sake of argument, Best Practical were to rewrite RT, what would you want to see in the new product?
Think big." OK... I think I'd start by not looking at the system as a simple ticketing or help desk system. What it really could become (and is close in a lot of ways already) is a generalized IT Management System (excluding for the moment financial concerns). I saw asset-tracking come up: great, but also project management elements, and development management efforts would be great to see too (did I mention multi-company support for my consulting company friends?)... if not all in RT 4, at least in a roadmap and strategic direction. I believe RT is really strong contender for this sort of management system because it has enough of the core elements that various functional expansions could take it in a lot of interesting ways. At our company (a retail company) we use it for our help desk, but also to track our development activities (though they are minor) using the Subversion integration, custom fields and some 'duct tape' code to automate some processes. We have tried to use it to schedule tasks for more complicated projects and we've come close, but not quite made it work. We also run into some issues when our development work gets more sophisticated... which makes sense we're turning what is now a help desk system (basically) into this more generalized sort of thing. The reason I believe RT has the potential I think it does is 1) IT tends to be task/request driven. Requests come in and they may be for a new piece of hardware or reporting a bug with an application... both start with 'requests' typically, though their life cycles are quite a bit different. The other possibility is projects; but those, too, tend to get devolved into specific tasks, assigned to specific people, which look a lot like ad hoc user requests with status reporting, time tracking, etc. RT has a good existing 'responsibilities' management process in its queuing support and also has good communication capabilities due to its email and 'people' association capabilities. So I already have division of labor and some efficiencies in communication at the core. If you start to extend this so that requests have 'natures' (understanding that one can turn into another) that can guide lifecycle (or should I say workflow) rules you start to provide a tool that can more deeply manage IT activities. A request nature might be support that later becomes development such that I can assign development attributes and processes to them... or spawn other 'requests' more readily to facilitate that part of my IT organization. Maybe it becomes a request for a WAN project that has hardware orders, IP address allocations, etc. and the associated requests become such that appropriate attributes and workflows get assigned to those. The custom field system gets you close to a lot of these, but a more 'out-of-box' way assigning functional value and data validation is needed. I know a lot of what I'm talking about is vague, pie in the sky kind of stuff, but once you premise yourself towards thinking in this way: not how to manage a specific IT function but how to manage an IT organization, I think you start laying the groundwork for making RT something it very likely can become: a full fledged IT management application. You also set the stage for those new ideas to come forward. Thanks, Steven C. Buttgereit Director of IT, Enterprise Applications Group Party America -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, May 01, 2007 11:10 AM To: rt-users@lists.bestpractical.com Subject: RT-Users Digest, Vol 38, Issue 3 Message: 3 Date: Tue, 1 May 2007 13:54:43 -0400 From: Jesse Vincent <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: [rt-users] RT 4 To: RT Users <rt-users@lists.bestpractical.com> Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" If, for the sake of argument, Best Practical were to rewrite RT, what would you want to see in the new product? Think big. Jesse - _______________________________________________ http://lists.bestpractical.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/rt-users Community help: http://wiki.bestpractical.com Commercial support: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Discover RT's hidden secrets with RT Essentials from O'Reilly Media. Buy a copy at http://rtbook.bestpractical.com
