This weekend I got a request from Angela about making some changes to her website, and I then realized that when I have multiple clients requests happening at the same time, I’m going to have to track them all! Currently, I am maintaining independent email and Basecamp threads with each of the 3 people I’m talking to, and this has been fine because I am in sales/new business mode. The request to make changes to an existing website threw me for a mini-loop, because there are different expectations for maintenance that I knew I needed to meet. Here’s how it breaks down:
- In the way I do sales/new business, there’s no timeframe to close. I move the process along as quickly as we’re comfortable going, and email seems to be a pretty good way to do this.
- Once the project is active, though, I switch to 37Signal’s online collaboration tool Basecamp to keep all our communications in one place. The client knows this is where I keep everything.
- With maintenance, the client expectation is different: you need to acknowledge the request, give a time estimate, and then meet it within a reasonable time. This is an intermittent request, and it requires a different kind of tracking.
The latter type of tracking is called issue tracking, and I didn’t have a system in place. So I looked around to see what kind of open source solutions were out there, and came across a class of software for support issue ticketing. The specific software I installed is the open source osTicket, which seems attractive and well-supported from the 15-minutes I spent looking around. There are a lot of different systems like this out there, so I’m basically taking a leap of faith based on how nifty the package looks and how clean the design workflow appears from the screenshots.
I installed the software on the agenceum.com website, which is currently sporting a brand new blank home page with the new logo on it. Currently, the help desk link is looking awfully generic, so I’ll figure out how to make my own template for it with the Agenceum/Dave Seah branding. In the meantime, though, I’ll be putting all maintenance requests I get for my projects through the ticket system and get a sense of how it works. This might be an effective way of managing ALL of my tasks and prioritizing them, actually. We shall see.
5 Comments
Hi Dave,
We’re using OS Ticket and Basecamp too. I’m wondering if you’ve found a way to integrate the two so maintenance requests in OS ticket become tasks in Basecamp? That would really cut down on duplicated effort.
Thanks.
Eric
Eric: I haven’t used OS Ticket for a long time, and am in the process of dumping Basecamp, so I unfortunately lack insight into the solution. I haven’t checked to see if Basecamp has an API that allows an external webservice to submit tasks into it. That’s where I would look first! Then it might be possible to write a hook for OS Ticket to auto-submit the issue. Some of the help desk solutions seem to do a better job of handling issues and managing them, so maybe that’s worth looking at too. Good luck!
Thanks for the follow-up Dave. Much appreciated. Out of curiosity, what did you end up using for project management and support tickets?
Thanks again.
Eric
Question, one year on how is OSTicket working out for you? Thanks in advance!
Mike: Still not using OSTicket! I actually recently dumped Basecamp also, as I no longer have clients but now have collaborators. Been trying out Slack.