Incident (INC) and task (ITASK) count

[nickthompson]

Our organisation uses Incidents, which are managed by our Service Desk/s. When those desks need to enlist the help of a 2nd or 3rd tier resolver group, they assign an ITASK out to the resolver group, who then update and close the Task record with the update being passed back to the Incident for the Service Desk/s to then action and Resolve the incident (or obtain further information, if required).

For performance management and staff education purposes, we have a requirement to report on the number of ITASK records created against each incident - in many cases this is zero, but in more complex cases there can be several ITASK records per incident.

The aim is to be able to identify trends in incident (and query) management identifying the types of issues where Service Desk staff knowledge could be improved to reduce the number of incidents they need to seek 2nd or 3rd tier help from.

I have looked at list views for both incident and task, and also reporting, but seem unable to use related fields to create any kind of meaningful information.

There is also (on the Incident List View) a Task Count column, but the data it shows bears no relation to the actual detail - eg, an incident with 12 Tasks against it only shows a task count of 5, and many incidents with a zero in this column actually have 1 or more tasks against them. The Task Count column is set-up as an integer, so I would expect it to be counting up tasks correctly, but I cannot find any scripts against UI Actions, Business Rules, etc, which show how this column calculates the information.

For info, our organisation uses Eureka, which has been updated to Patch 12 recently.

Can anyone suggest a solution (either as a report, or some form of scripting against this field)?

Many thanks

[Uncle Rob]

That "ITASK" solution sounds custom.

First thing I'd do is deconstruct what that thing is made of.   Go to the ITASK form, right click the header, and go to Personalize -> Dictionary.   That should bring you to a list view containing records for all the fields on that form.

What does the table column say?   If it begins with a u_, its a custom table (that's good news by the way).

Next, I'd find out what's actually relating these things to the Incident.   You can do this a couple ways.

- From the dictionary entries for that table, group by type and look at hte reference fields.   You're interested in anything that links to Incident or Task.

- From the ITASK form, look for any field that relates to incident, right click it.   It should give you the field's name if you're an admin.   THAT field is the what you should predicate your related list on in the Incident form.