Is your company using a program that is playing big part to your business? Some examples would be: ERP, Warehouse, POS, BI, HR system, Finance… If answer is yes, there are most likely problems associated in using it.
Problem could be user related (user not knowing the system) or the problem is system related (Program has a bug).
If the program is developed in house, then development department uses their own system for bug management. There is a procedure in place how bugs are reported. Now, if the program is not developed in house, problems need to be escalated to the vendor.
Bug management is important, you want that your users are satisfied users of a program, if they are not, they will have resistance using the program and they will demoralize other users, new starters… and that is not good.
If you are a public company, then you are subjected to IT audit, where they also review how you handle bugs, so its important to have that covered.
You may also have monthly meetings with the vendor, where you can present all the issues you may have and discuss which are most problematic…
There are loads of programs for bug management, some are free, some are not. Some are popular and some are not. You can also run bug list in Excel spread sheet.
What these systems have in common is the fact that they are not part of ServiceDesk Plus. That means that you have 2 separate systems – one is for problem aggregation, the other one is for managing the problems.
In ideal world, you would have one system, one perfect system that would enable this for you.
ServiceDesk Plus Professional edition comes without this kind of system. But there is a way, to handle this. Let me show you.
First you need to define either a Group, Category, Subcategory or on Item – that depends how is your work organized – For this example, I have created Subcategory Bug reporting which is inside category software.
Then create template that will be used for bug management.
Go to admin – incident template – click on new template.
You need to define what kind info you are interested in.
Some are listed below:
Status – CLOSED, OPEN, MONITORING
Type – ERP, Finance, POS, Warehousing
Owner – Who outside of your IT Department is responsible for it
Frequency – 1,2,3,4,5 how frequent does this bug occur?
Impact on business – 1,2,3,4,5 How severely is business affected
Date requested – when was vendor notified about this bug.
Date completed – When was this BUG resolved
Resolved in version – which version was without this bug?
You can use fields that are in default template example priority – or you can create new fields that are used on reports only Priority: 1,2,3,4.
Once you have created template, it’s time to change requests to the template that was just created.
Go to requests – Edit request that is a bug
Go to change template and change it to Bug template you just created.
You need to fill out all the new fields.
Almost done, What we need now is report which shows our bugs.
Go to reports, click on new Custom Report.
Now you need to choose the fields you created on custom template.
In my example fields are:
Request ID, Type, Custom Status, Owner, Frequency, Subject, Date notified, Completed, Resolved in version
Choose filter options, and choose Subcategory as Bug reporting. That is needed so that it shows only items that are in subcategory bug reporting, otherwise all the items would be shown.
Go to Run Report – Voila.
You are looking at the Bug list with all required info.
