Parent/Child Incident - Best Practices for a Service Desk

[Walt Roth]

Hi.  
I have a question about best practices regarding Parent/Child Incidents and how a Service Desk should handle these tickets during outage situations.

Let's pretend there is a WIFI issue and as a result, 50 different people report this issue to the Service Desk.  Since each Service Desk agent is going to create an Incident as the calls come in, 50 tickets will be created, 1 for each customer.  

The Service Desk see's that these tickets are all related to the same WIFI issue.  The Service Desk creates a Parent Incident for the WIFI issue and assigns it to the WIFI Support,  Assignment group.  Tickets that come in from the Web portal will also be attached to the Parent Incident.

Question 1 - What is the best practice for who to assign the child records to?

Example 1:   Let's pretend that the Parent Ticket has not yet been assigned to a technician/engineer yet. So, that Parent Ticket is in the WIFI Support assignment group, and it's currently unassigned to an individual.

A) Even though the Service Desk is attaching their tickets to the Parent Incident, does the Service Desk also assign each new child records to that same WIFI Support assignment group, or does each Service Desk technician assign the child ticket to themselves?

Example 2:  Now let's say the Parent Ticket is assigned to a technician/engineer in the WIFI Support group. 

A) Do the Service Desk Agents now go back and assign all the child tickets created for the WIFI issue to that WIFI Support technician/engineer, or do they do nothing, and just hold on to the ticket until the Parent ticket is resolved/closed?

There are several competing opinions on this and we're trying to determine what is the best practice for handling child incidents.

We do understand that as notes/updates are added to the Parent Incident, those notes will cascade down to each individual Child record.  We also undertand that when the Parent Incident closes, all the Child records will close too.  And finally, we understand that for reporting purposes, we do not give credit for any Child Ticket resolved since no work was actually done on these other tickets.

So this all said... what is the best practice for handling child records and who should hold onto them?

Thanks for allowing my questions. 🙂

Walt

[Blue]

Any recommendations?