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Tickets, Tasks, Changes & Projects

Most PSAs break work apart by minting another ticket type, board, or status per team. FlowPSA breaks work apart with tasks on one root.

Three roots

Every piece of work has exactly one root, which says why the work exists.

Root Use it for Number
Ticket Unplanned, reactive work: incidents, outages, degradations. The SLA clock lives here. INCnnnnnnn
Work order Planned, discrete work: add a user, install a switch, fulfil a request. WO-nnnnnnn
Project Planned, multi-phase work: onboarding, cutover, migration. PRJ-nnnnnnn

A firewall install does not live on an outage ticket. If an incident happens during a project, the incident stays a ticket and links to the project.

Two children

Tasks are assigned slices of a root, routed to a queue such as Networking or Security. A task can block the root from closing, and completing a task can spawn the next one. Waiving a task takes a named person and a reason.

Change requests are controlled changes to a system. They always hang off a root. A change request cannot exist without three plans:

  1. An implementation plan: what changes, on which devices and sites.
  2. A validation plan: how you will prove it worked.
  3. A rollback plan: how you undo it, and who is on the hook.

Change approval always needs a second person. Rolling back is a first-class, safe outcome, not a failure.

Example: VPN drops at Acme Warehouse

INC0001042  VPN drops at Acme Warehouse
  Task   Operations   diagnose concentrator     (first, blocking)
  Task   Networking   check site firewall       (parallel)
  Task   Security     review auth logs          (parallel)
  Task   Operations   apply fix and verify      (after the three above)
  Change              update firewall rule       (plans required before approval)

Problem records

When many tickets share one cause, link them to a problem record (PRBnnnnnnn). Recurring-incident detection suggests clusters. Resolving the problem can write the root cause and workaround to every linked ticket.

Lifecycles

  • Ticket: open, in progress, resolved, closed. Resolution passes the resolution gate.
  • Work order: open, in progress, completed or cancelled. It cannot complete with open blocking tasks or unfinished changes.
  • Project: planning, active, on hold, completed or cancelled. Same completion rule.
  • Change request: draft, pending approval, approved, implementing, validating, then closed or rolled back.

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