How do you handle on behalf of?

[bburdick]

We have a business case where in situations a user may call and request work to be done on behalf of someone else.

For instance an admin assistant calls the Service Desk to have a ticket/task be created for their administrator to get a workstation moved. We need to capture that the Service Desk agent opened the ticket, but the request was made by the admin assistant and was made for their administrator.

For now what I have done is created a new field on the request table of "requested by". When users see our forms they will see the requested for and requested by. I have them auto fill based on who is logged into the Service Now making the request.

This looks a bit awkward. It is similar to how we have our Incident form set up where we have the Caller and then if they are calling "On Behalf Of" someone else.

Any suggestions or comments on how you may approach this issue?

[Mark Stanger]

What you've done is pretty typical. At the end of the day you'll need 2 fields for people to fill this data in. One other thing to keep in mind is that there is an 'Opened by' field available that automatically populates with the user actually opening the ticket. If users always use 'Requested for' to indicate the name of the true 'Requested for' person then you should have a record of the person making the request in the 'Opened by' field if your end users enter the request through the portal. The one exception to this would be the situation where the end user calls the service desk to make a request on behalf of somebody else. In that case, you might need all 3 pieces of information or you might just have your technicians modify the 'Opened by' value from the back-end form after the record is submitted.

[bburdick]

Thanks for the input, Mark. At least we don't feel like we are the only ones that need this.

I did get some advice from someone else that suggested, I hide the "requested by" field and only reveal the "requested by" if the "requested for" is different than the person filling out the form. As I noted above the "requested by" and "requested for" default to the person filling out the form.

This is actually working very well for us so that is how we are going to move forward. A simple and elegant solution, imho.

Cheers,

Benjamin

[michael_perkins]

Along similar lines is there a way for the admin assistant to view the ticket details on screen after submission? We have a number of admins that handle a number of management personnel and they would like a better way to track tickets.

[Jason Stephens]

We modified the filter on the 'My Requested Items" list on the home page to show "opened by" also. So now that list shows things requested for me and opened by me. it seems to work pretty well.