Use RT's Clone Ticket feature to quickly copy equipment info

Context

• Request Tracker (RT) on help.mit.edu

Use case

Let's say you have service center where customers often drop off equipment for repair and maintenance. You've configured your queue in RT to have custom fields for a variety of meta data associated with customer equipment, such as serial number, MIT property tag number, purchase date, platform, operating system, and so on. It's a major pain to have to re-enter this information every time the customer brings the same machine in for service again, but on the other hand you want complete information in each ticket. RT's "clone ticket" feature can be used to make this process quick and easy. Below are two suggested process implementations.

Quick and Easy #1

1. Search for past tickets by the same customer/Requestor
   You can do this by typing the Requestor's email address into "Search..." box in the upper right corner of every RT screen. For example, typing "othomas@mit.edu" into the box will pull up all tickets where "Oliver Thomas <othomas@mit.edu>" is the Requestor. You can also use a known ticket number, or use RT's search builder for more sophisticated queries.
2. Open the most recent ticket related to the machine
   You'll want to open it to the Display screen. This is the default unless you configured your RT to use the Call Center screen as your personal default.
3. In the Links section, click on the (Create) link next to Refers to:
   RT will present you with a new ticket creation screen, with all field values pre-populated with the content from the previous ticket. You can now change only what needs changing, add an issue description, and click Create to create the new ticket.

The steps above work for any existing ticket, and require no preparation. Read on for a more sophisticated procedure below, which requires a little preparation and structure but might provide more return on your investment in the long run.

Quick and Easy #2

This procedure requires a little setup and a few extra steps the first time a piece of equipment is encountered. However, it makes subsequent encounters more sophisticated and gives you a more organized, structured approach to handling tickets.

1. Decide on what your common lookup keys will be
   For example, machine serial number, MIT property tag number, and so on. Requestor is available automatically.
2. The first time a machine comes in, create a ticket for the machine and populate all the custom fields the way you want
3. Also put the lookup keys you want quick access to into the ticket subject
   You may want to standardize an a ticket subject line for these kinds of tickets. For example, something like "Equipment record serial W8024473AGZ MIT 0425664"
4. Mark the ticket Waiting to keep it open but out of the way

Do not use this ticket to track the actual work on the machine. Instead, use the (Create) link next to Children: in the links section to create the first work ticket for the machine. RT will clone the ticket with all the serial and machine info you added to the machine record ticket.

For subsequent times this machine comes in, you can use the "Search..." box on RT pages to quickly search for the serial number or MIT tag number to pull up the equipment record ticket. (This is why we left the ticket "Waiting", since the search box only searches the subjects of open tickets.) Open the equipment record ticket, and click on the (Create) link next to Children: to create a new work ticket based on the equipment record ticket.

As an added benefit, you will now have a nice collection of child tickets for each repair or service incident for that machine. And if the machine configuration needs updating, for example if the OS version changes, this change can be made in the equipment record ticket and will automatically be carried forward to future incident tickets.

Quick Tip If you are in a situation where a lot of equipment that comes in for service or repair has a barcode on it, for example an MIT property tag, the second method described above has an additional advantage. Since it allows lookup of the equipment record ticket by this number, you can use a USB barcode scanner to further simplify data entry. Most USB barcode scanners will act as USB keyboards. Simply put the input focus into the "Search..." box by clicking on it with your mouse or by using the browser access key "0" (Ctrl-Option-0 on the Mac and Alt-Shift-0 on Windows) and scan the barcode. Most scanners will automatically insert a return/enter key press after the scan, immediately running the search.