Getting started with problem management
To enable your staff members to create a problem, you must configure the following:
Roles
Roles enable you to configure hierarchy in your organization. You can control the level of visibility that users have on the data by using roles.
For more information about configuring roles, see Managing-roles.
Users
BMC Remedyforce supports the following user types:
To add staff members, see Adding-or-editing-users. The users who submit a problem or work to resolve a problem can be staff members.
BMC recommends that you assign permission sets to your users. When you are upgrading to a major release, most of the profile permissions are updated automatically for permission sets. If you do not assign permission sets, you need to manually update permissions of each profile.
Queues
Create the queues to which problems will be assigned. Your staff members need to monitor the designated queues and assign records to themselves or other staff members. You might have a dedicated member (based on your team size and number of requests) in your team who monitors the queues and does assignments.
For more information about adding queues, see Configuring-queues.
Categories
Categories help you to classify data for reporting purposes. While raising a problem, staff members raise the problem on a category, such as Hardware and you can configure a workflow that assigns all the problems with Hardware category to the Hardware and Maintenance queue.
You can also create parent-child relationship between categories by defining category types. Some categories are provided to you out-of-the-box, such as Account Administration, Network, and so on.
For information about adding categories, see Creating-categories.
Status
Status of a record helps you to track the record through its life cycle. The following points help you in understanding the difference in the terminologies used to create a status:
- State: Determines if a record is opened or closed. Status will either has state opened or closed.
- Status: Determines where the record is in the life cycle, such as accepted, assigned.
- Stage: Grouping of various status values, such as Active, Approved, Broken Down, Development, and so on are grouped under In Progress stage. A stage tracks a record from Opening to Closure. The following stages are provided:
- Opened
- Acknowledged
- In Process
- Closed
You must assign the status that you add to one of the stages.
For more information about adding status, see Creating-status-records.
Impact-urgency-priority
Impact and urgency values of a record determine the priority assigned to the record. By default, some urgency, impact, and priority values are provided. The following figure shows how priority is calculated depending on the impact and urgency values:
Determine if you need additional impact, urgency, or priority values. If yes, also determine how the urgency and impact values will determine the priority. For more information, see Creating-impacts, Creating-urgencies, and Creating-priorities.
Knowledge articles
You can add the following types of knowledge articles in BMC Remedyforce:
- FAQ
- How to
- Known Error
- Problem Solution
All your staff members can add, update, and retire knowledge articles.
Prepare a list of staff members whom you want to enable to publish knowledge articles. Select the Remedyforce Knowledge User check box for these users on the User Details page. For more information, see Enabling-users-to-publish-retire-or-check-out-a-knowledge-article.
For more information about creating knowledge articles, see Creating-a-knowledge-article.
Workflows
Workflows help you in automating frequently occurring actions in your service desk. For example, you can create a workflow to send an email message to clients whenever the status of the problem raised by them is updated. BMC Remedyforce provides you some workflows out of the box. All these workflows are inactive by default. You must activate the workflows that you need.
The following workflows are provided out of the box for incidents:
- Notify problem owner when change request linked to problem is closed
- Notify problem owner when each linked task is closed
- Notify problem owner when final task linked to problem is closed
- Open popup dialog for recalculating due date when priority of problem changes
For more information about activating a workflow, see Configuring-workflows.
Prepare a list of workflows that you will need in your service desk. Create the workflows that are not provided out of the box. For more information, see Salesforce Help.
Email templates
You can associate email templates with workflows or approval processes. Whenever a workflow is triggered, an email message is sent to the required users. By default, email templates that are associated with the out-of-the-box workflows are provided with the package.
If required, you can customize these email templates or create new email templates and associate them with the required workflows. For more information, see Creating-an-email-template and Customizing-an-email-template.
Administrator settings
The Remedyforce Administration tab is one-stop location for all the configurations that are available in BMC Remedyforce. It also contains links to the Salesforce Setup area. All the settings are categorized in various tiles. The following settings are related to setting up problems:
Reports
Staff members and system administrators can use the Reports tab to view predefined reports. You can also create reports based on your requirements. However, only the system administrators can create additional report types.
For system administrators, data is also available in the form of charts and tables in the Dashboards tab. To enable staff members with Salesforce or Salesforce Platform license access the Dashboards tab, assign the Manage Dashboard profile-level permission.
Testing your environment
- Ensure that you are able to create a problem in the Remedyforce Console tab.
- If you have activated workflows, ensure that the workflows are triggered at the configured condition.