Ticket Module of Service Ticket System - IT Service Management

Service Ticket System Overview

Jim has just taken the position of the Director of the IT department. Understanding that the top priority of his position is to provide quality IT services to internal employees, he wants to digitize IT services by first adopting an IT Service Ticket system (STS) to manage service requests and keep track of service quality.

Currently, the IT department offers support services (e.g., installation, setup, upgrade, replacement) on hardware (called assets, and could include any hardware used by business departments including desktop, laptops, cellphones, each of which carries a unique four-digit ID) and software (the standard software applications provided to all employee across different departments). The basic information kept for all hardware includes AssetID, manufacturer, model, and manufacture date. But for desktop and laptop, additional information such as screen size is also kept. For software applications, the information stored includes vendor name, vendor contact, version number, license number, and license type.

One key module of the system is the Ticket module where service tickets are created and updated. There are three ways to create a ticket: by email, phone, or via the web site. There is a designated email address for employees to use to report any technical issues with hardware and software. The system shall, upon receiving an email from an employee, automatically generate a ticket with a unique ticket number. Employees could also create a ticket via the web site where they could provide his or her contact information and the description of an issue. If an employee makes a call to report an issue, the IT professional who answers the phone will create a ticket. Regardless of the different methods of creating a ticket, an automatic email notification confirming ticket creation will be sent to the employee.

A new ticket will be added to the ticket pool and listed in the order based on the time the ticket is created. A ticket contains ticketID, date and time created, the name of the employee for whom the ticket is created, and description of an issue.

When an IT professional logs into the ticket system, he or she will see the list of the tickets in the ticket pool. If the employee doesn’t have an existing ticket, he or she could select the ticket on the top of the list. Once a ticket is selected, it will show up on the professional’s to-do list, and its status will change from “new,” to “assigned.” The professional will then investigate the issue, and once the issue is resolved, update the ticket status to “closed.” In closing a ticket, the professional will indicate the category of the issue (e.g., application update, hardware maintenance), and asset information (e.g., assigned asset ID, asset type such as laptop, desktop setup). The automatic email notification of the closure of the ticket will be sent to the employee, and the completed ticket will be added to the employee’s list of completed tasks.  

Once a ticket is taken by one IT professional, other IT professionals could only check the ticket details, but couldn’t update the ticket. If for some reason the IT professional who owns a ticket couldn’t complete the work, he or she will send a request to Jim to transfer the ticket back to the ticket pool. Upon approval, Jim then change the ticket’s status from “assigned” to “new” and the ticket will be returned to the top of the ticket list.

A ticket can be cancelled if, before it is resolved, the employee who initially reported issue doesn’t need the service anymore. To do so, the employee could email or call the IT department to cancel the ticket. The ticket status will be changed to “cancelled.” The IT professional who is responsible for (owns) the ticket then cancels the ticket. As the result of the cancellation, an automatic email confirmation will be sent to the employee.

It is expected that any reported issue shall be resolved within three business days. If an issue remains unresolved within the time period, the status of the ticket will be changed to “outstanding,” and Jim will be notified. When an IT professional has an outstanding ticket, he or she can’t take on any new ticket.

The system shall allow Jim to check the progress of all tickets by criteria such as ticket status, employee, and time period. Jim could also update details (e.g., status) of a ticket if needed. Each time the status of a ticket is changed, the system will keep a record with a unique transaction ID. The transaction cannot be changed or modified by anyone. In that way, all IT professionals could have an accurate view of a ticket history.

With the functionalities identified above, Jim hopes that he could take it up a notch the quality of services provided by his department.

Your individual project is developed based on the case description above. All the diagrams should be created using a diagramming tool (e.g., draw.io) and copied and pasted to a MS Word document, which then should be submitted to D2L. The following details the required content for project phase I.

Required Content

• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Assumptions (Optional)
• Domain Class diagram - Draw a domain class diagram for the system
• Use case diagram - Based on the above project case description, develop a use case diagram containing all major (e.g., create xxx, update xxx, search xxx) use cases of the system.

Select three use cases and use these three use cases for the following diagrams and descriptions.

• Use case description - Write a fully detailed use case description for each use case in the use case diagram.
• Activity diagram - Develop one activity diagram for each use case description

The table below summarizes the number of diagrams needed for project phase I