IT/Software career thread: Invert binary trees for dollars.

  • Guest, it's time once again for the massively important and exciting FoH Asshat Tournament!



    Go here and give us your nominations!
    Who's been the biggest Asshat in the last year? Give us your worst ones!
Phazael

Phazael

Confirmed Beta Shitlord, Fat Bastard
<Aristocrat╭ರ_•́>
14,692
31,618
It is creeping into federal employment, too. Trumps EO put it on hold, but its only a matter of time before these blue hair liberal arts cunts manning the HR departments try to push for it again. Fucking annoying.

Big Phoenix Big Phoenix -
Find out if another branch (or even another company) can use the old boxes for parts. If they can, you look awesome for saving resources or money. If not, the company is going to have to pony up for some electronics disposal. Thats rarely cheap. There are a lot of people who will take the CAT5 just to recover the metal in it (it gets stolen for recycling off of new construction sites all the time), so that will probably be easy to get rid of, however.
 
Onoes

Onoes

Trakanon Raider
1,461
1,228
Anyone have a ticketing system they like? I have a small 5 person team that's functioned on Facebook messenger, excel, and literal sticky notes slapped on each others monitors. It mostly works, but things slip through the cracks, or someone is out sick for a few days and the rest of us didn't know he told X person he was going to be there to finish Y project at Z time. Basically, it's time we get a little more accountable (even if its just to ourselves, management hasn't ever asked for any kind of reports justifying our time or anything), and it would be nice to have a general gameplan for the day/week/month/year. I'm demoing ServiceNow, Freshservice, and Solarwinds in the next couple of weeks, but thought I would ask here for input.

Ideally, I would like people to be able to log in (most of our work is in the field, so Mobile is a must), see whatever tickets they have personally assigned - but also view and modify all tickets. I can think of other nice things - such as scheduling projects on a shared calendar, users being able to easily create tickets (ideally pulling info from AD so the users basically just get a box to type in and a button that says submit), push notifications to phones.

Things I don't give two fucks about - Any kind of self help/knowledge base functionality (our users WILL NOT ever use this), any kind of inventory system (not our job), or any kind of equipment purchasing shopping cart stuff. All 3 of those seem to be big selling points from providers we just don't need.

So yeah, any "This is great" or even "Do not use this!" comments would be appreciated.
 
Identikit

Identikit

Redneck Pornographer
<Bronze Donator>
2,211
3,875
Onoes said:
Anyone have a ticketing system they like? I have a small 5 person team that's functioned on Facebook messenger, excel, and literal sticky notes slapped on each others monitors. It mostly works, but things slip through the cracks, or someone is out sick for a few days and the rest of us didn't know he told X person he was going to be there to finish Y project at Z time. Basically, it's time we get a little more accountable (even if its just to ourselves, management hasn't ever asked for any kind of reports justifying our time or anything), and it would be nice to have a general gameplan for the day/week/month/year. I'm demoing ServiceNow, Freshservice, and Solarwinds in the next couple of weeks, but thought I would ask here for input.

Ideally, I would like people to be able to log in (most of our work is in the field, so Mobile is a must), see whatever tickets they have personally assigned - but also view and modify all tickets. I can think of other nice things - such as scheduling projects on a shared calendar, users being able to easily create tickets (ideally pulling info from AD so the users basically just get a box to type in and a button that says submit), push notifications to phones.

Things I don't give two fucks about - Any kind of self help/knowledge base functionality (our users WILL NOT ever use this), any kind of inventory system (not our job), or any kind of equipment purchasing shopping cart stuff. All 3 of those seem to be big selling points from providers we just don't need.

So yeah, any "This is great" or even "Do not use this!" comments would be appreciated.
Click to expand...


i personally like jira/zendesk out of all the helpdesk systems that I have used.

Its probably not the best per se but out of the 4 that I have used its been the best.

the worst I have used? Jitbit. Stay the fuck away from that shit.
 
  • 1Like
Reactions: 1 user
Louis

Louis

Trakanon Raider
2,836
1,105
Onoes said:
Anyone have a ticketing system they like? I have a small 5 person team that's functioned on Facebook messenger, excel, and literal sticky notes slapped on each others monitors. It mostly works, but things slip through the cracks, or someone is out sick for a few days and the rest of us didn't know he told X person he was going to be there to finish Y project at Z time. Basically, it's time we get a little more accountable (even if its just to ourselves, management hasn't ever asked for any kind of reports justifying our time or anything), and it would be nice to have a general gameplan for the day/week/month/year. I'm demoing ServiceNow, Freshservice, and Solarwinds in the next couple of weeks, but thought I would ask here for input.

Ideally, I would like people to be able to log in (most of our work is in the field, so Mobile is a must), see whatever tickets they have personally assigned - but also view and modify all tickets. I can think of other nice things - such as scheduling projects on a shared calendar, users being able to easily create tickets (ideally pulling info from AD so the users basically just get a box to type in and a button that says submit), push notifications to phones.

Things I don't give two fucks about - Any kind of self help/knowledge base functionality (our users WILL NOT ever use this), any kind of inventory system (not our job), or any kind of equipment purchasing shopping cart stuff. All 3 of those seem to be big selling points from providers we just don't need.

So yeah, any "This is great" or even "Do not use this!" comments would be appreciated.
Click to expand...
I'm a ServiceNow Dev/Admin and I used FreshService before my previous company was bought out. It sounds like FreshService would be more inline with your needs as it's much more straight forward. I don't have specifics but I do not think there's a cheap way of getting ServiceNow and in order to get the most out of it, you really need a group dedicated to it. There's too much functionality for a small shop to ever get the value out of it to justify the price.

It also revolves around the service portal/cart experience. There are plenty of ways around it, but then it's like why did you pay all of this money to sidestep it.


If you have any more questions regarding it feel free to ask though.
 
  • 1Like
Reactions: 1 user
TJT

TJT

Mr. Poopybutthole
<Gold Donor>
42,797
109,253
Onoes said:
Anyone have a ticketing system they like? I have a small 5 person team that's functioned on Facebook messenger, excel, and literal sticky notes slapped on each others monitors. It mostly works, but things slip through the cracks, or someone is out sick for a few days and the rest of us didn't know he told X person he was going to be there to finish Y project at Z time. Basically, it's time we get a little more accountable (even if its just to ourselves, management hasn't ever asked for any kind of reports justifying our time or anything), and it would be nice to have a general gameplan for the day/week/month/year. I'm demoing ServiceNow, Freshservice, and Solarwinds in the next couple of weeks, but thought I would ask here for input.

Ideally, I would like people to be able to log in (most of our work is in the field, so Mobile is a must), see whatever tickets they have personally assigned - but also view and modify all tickets. I can think of other nice things - such as scheduling projects on a shared calendar, users being able to easily create tickets (ideally pulling info from AD so the users basically just get a box to type in and a button that says submit), push notifications to phones.

Things I don't give two fucks about - Any kind of self help/knowledge base functionality (our users WILL NOT ever use this), any kind of inventory system (not our job), or any kind of equipment purchasing shopping cart stuff. All 3 of those seem to be big selling points from providers we just don't need.

So yeah, any "This is great" or even "Do not use this!" comments would be appreciated.
Click to expand...
Use Jira?
 
  • 1Like
Reactions: 1 user
Onoes

Onoes

Trakanon Raider
1,461
1,228
Awesome, thanks for the input, I'll check Jira out and cancel my Fresh service meeting. Appreciate the input!
 
TJT

TJT

Mr. Poopybutthole
<Gold Donor>
42,797
109,253
Onoes said:
Awesome, thanks for the input, I'll check Jira out and cancel my Fresh service meeting. Appreciate the input!
Click to expand...
IDK what your workflow is like but we use Jira for everything.

We devs use it, IT uses it, Finance and shit use it. It's really customizable with a little dev time.
 
  • 1Like
Reactions: 1 user
Onoes

Onoes

Trakanon Raider
1,461
1,228
We are just running support for a Tribal government on a reservation.. so our workflow is almost like working for relatives. Doesn't matter what you are doing, if work dad (Tribal Chairman) calls and asks you to help with something, you go, even if that thing has nothing to do with IT. If a Council member calls and wants you to come to their house and figure out why their Netflix isn't working, that's your job now.

We pretty much have everything broken up into 3 categories
Stuff that needs to be done SOMEDAY
Stuff that needs to be done SOONISH, within a few weeks
Stuff that needs to be done TODAY

The problem is that a lot of the time the TODAY stuff pushes the SOONISH stuff out, and the SOMEDAY stuff is just never a priority. We are always going to managing the day to day shit, just hoping that with an actual system we are going to have a visible "You bought all the stuff to upgrade the camera system in X building 8 months ago..." reminder to help us avoid situations like that.

Plus, if someone ever does go "Why do we even need an IT department?" it would be nice to be able to print up 100 pages of tickets and go "That's what we did in the last month alone."
 
  • 1Like
Reactions: 1 user
TJT

TJT

Mr. Poopybutthole
<Gold Donor>
42,797
109,253
Onoes said:
We are just running support for a Tribal government on a reservation.. so our workflow is almost like working for relatives. Doesn't matter what you are doing, if work dad (Tribal Chairman) calls and asks you to help with something, you go, even if that thing has nothing to do with IT. If a Council member calls and wants you to come to their house and figure out why their Netflix isn't working, that's your job now.

We pretty much have everything broken up into 3 categories
Stuff that needs to be done SOMEDAY
Stuff that needs to be done SOONISH, within a few weeks
Stuff that needs to be done TODAY

The problem is that a lot of the time the TODAY stuff pushes the SOONISH stuff out, and the SOMEDAY stuff is just never a priority. We are always going to managing the day to day shit, just hoping that with an actual system we are going to have a visible "You bought all the stuff to upgrade the camera system in X building 8 months ago..." reminder to help us avoid situations like that.

Plus, if someone ever does go "Why do we even need an IT department?" it would be nice to be able to print up 100 pages of tickets and go "That's what we did in the last month alone."
Click to expand...
Good idea.

So I don't want to get into agile methodology too hard because it's a buzzword and seriously nobody applies it in the way it was meant to. As it very specifically should only work in software development. Nonetheless if you use Jira organize your work into "sprints" all of our teams have found it increased productivity doing this. As it gives the idea of competition along with very manageable blocks of work so you always feel like you accomplish a lot. Even if it is just repackaging the tasks you already had.

Just a thought.

Jira has some advanced reporting engines too so you can have some nice reports on demand to show what you're talking about at any time.
 
  • 1Like
Reactions: 1 user
Control

Control

Bronze Baronet of the Realm
3,087
8,138
Onoes said:
Anyone have a ticketing system they like?
Click to expand...
For a 5-man team that's used to doing things pretty informally, I think everyone will hate Jira, especially you. It has lots of stuff so it looks good on paper, but 90% of that stuff will just get in the way. I would see if you can make Trello do what you need. It's not a "ticketing" system, but it's dead simple and you can set it up however you want. You can have emails and I think even texts sent directly to cards that you can then assign to people or lump into your "today, later, probably never" lists or whereever, so that might be ticketing enough.
 
Noodleface

Noodleface

A Mod Real Quick
38,287
15,127
Yeah JIRA is nice enough for most shit

You just have to beat it into their heads that they need to self police and actually update the shit

We have a guy on our team that absolutely refuses and its annoying. Everyday he tells the PM to move stories around in our standup, rather than do it before the meeting like everyone else
 
alavaz

alavaz

Trakanon Raider
2,003
714
We have Jira and I dislike the ticketing part of it (might just be our setup). We're supposed to track our tasks in it, but there's no way to assign multiple people to the same task, so we wind up duplicating the tasks for each person which I think is lame.
 
brekk

brekk

Dancing Dino Superstar
<Bronze Donator>
2,194
1,749
Current job is an MSP and we use Connectwise for everything, including non-IT roles. Works pretty well.
 
Mist

Mist

REEEEeyore
<Gold Donor>
31,238
23,459
Onoes said:
We are just running support for a Tribal government on a reservation.. so our workflow is almost like working for relatives. Doesn't matter what you are doing, if work dad (Tribal Chairman) calls and asks you to help with something, you go, even if that thing has nothing to do with IT. If a Council member calls and wants you to come to their house and figure out why their Netflix isn't working, that's your job now.

We pretty much have everything broken up into 3 categories
Stuff that needs to be done SOMEDAY
Stuff that needs to be done SOONISH, within a few weeks
Stuff that needs to be done TODAY

The problem is that a lot of the time the TODAY stuff pushes the SOONISH stuff out, and the SOMEDAY stuff is just never a priority. We are always going to managing the day to day shit, just hoping that with an actual system we are going to have a visible "You bought all the stuff to upgrade the camera system in X building 8 months ago..." reminder to help us avoid situations like that.

Plus, if someone ever does go "Why do we even need an IT department?" it would be nice to be able to print up 100 pages of tickets and go "That's what we did in the last month alone."
Click to expand...
Jira is more for development than IT.

You need some ITIL-centric ITSM platform. ServiceNOW with the incidents, tasks, changes and project modules are really all you need. ServiceNOW also has a pretty good IT asset management platform too, if you need that kind of thing.
 
  • 1Like
Reactions: 1 user
Ao-

Ao-

¯\_(ツ)_/¯
<WoW Guild Officer>
7,879
507
Mist said:
Jira is more for development than IT.

You need some ITIL-centric ITSM platform. ServiceNOW with the incidents, tasks, changes and project modules are really all you need. ServiceNOW also has a pretty good IT asset management platform too, if you need that kind of thing.
Click to expand...
There are simpler tools for it, but ServiceNow works really well for the ITSM stuff. Workflows built out for ticketing stuff, request items, knowledge base, even forms to build out automation. Now, development can suck on that platform, but it can be awesome if you get it setup.
 
TJT

TJT

Mr. Poopybutthole
<Gold Donor>
42,797
109,253
alavaz said:
We have Jira and I dislike the ticketing part of it (might just be our setup). We're supposed to track our tasks in it, but there's no way to assign multiple people to the same task, so we wind up duplicating the tasks for each person which I think is lame.
Click to expand...
We have this problem too. Workaround we've used is that you assign it to whoever but have others as watchers/tagged in the ticket so they keep on it. Or break it up into multiple smaller tickets for the same parent task. This would be a misuse of the Epic project ticket for service type tasks but serves the same function.
 
TJT

TJT

Mr. Poopybutthole
<Gold Donor>
42,797
109,253
Ao- said:
There are simpler tools for it, but ServiceNow works really well for the ITSM stuff. Workflows built out for ticketing stuff, request items, knowledge base, even forms to build out automation. Now, development can suck on that platform, but it can be awesome if you get it setup.
Click to expand...
Jira is now how we track all hours worked across the entire company (except for sales) too by using this same logic. We use something called Harvester and some custom code I made for. most of it though.
 
Noodleface

Noodleface

A Mod Real Quick
38,287
15,127
For awhile we did 1 point = 1 day (8 hours), but thankfully we moved to actual complexity where it's a bit more nebulous
 
You must log in or register to reply here.