We are asking the user to start “troubleshooting” in the current model with the UI offering top level technology areas branching down further into problem areas within each top-level domain.  I believe this is looking at the ticket creation path from the view of the system and not from the perspective of the ticket creator.

The ticket creation should be from the perspective of the ticket submitter.  For instance, a faculty member who is currently teaching a course with the classroom display that stops working will not go through the trouble of selecting the area of the problem in a decision model to eventually arrive at a subsection that describes the issue.

The alternative would be to have options for faculty experiencing the issue by first selecting who they are.  Faculty have different technology requirements than Staff.  Staff have different technology requirements than Students.  Students have different technology need than Parents.  You get the idea.

So instead of looking at it from the problem areas at the start, we should be looking at the ticket creator from the perspective of their ‘role’ such as Faculty, Staff, Student or Parent.  This roll would be mapped to the most likely problem areas for that ‘role’ in selection options.  This might include problem areas for a Faculty like a problem connecting to a familiar web site or issue with a classroom projector or the inability to cast to the classroom display.  Also, the option should exist to specify whether this is an immediate need for current classroom session or something that can wait for resolution before the next classroom booking.  This in turn would be mapped to the urgency, severity, impact and whether a workaround is available.  We should be able to create the top 10 problems for each ‘role’ within the district and create mapping to business logic determining the criteria mappings to the ultimate ‘Priority’ and ‘SLA’.  The goal would be to make the ticket entry shorter for higher priority tickets and a little longer for those with a lower priority.

This could change current logic and UI entirely.  However, I believe that looking at the ticket entry from the user's perspective would bring better results in ticket entry, data mappings and ultimate reports for a better understanding of our performance in addressing the needs of our districts.