Create Tasks Directly from Tickets

[dschipfel]

Tickets often lead to one or more follow-up activities that need to be tracked separately. It would be very useful if users could create one or multiple tasks directly from within a ticket.

Current challenge

When a ticket requires additional work, users currently need to manually create tasks and then maintain the relationship between the ticket and the tasks themselves.

Examples:

• Implementing a solution
• Coordinating with another department
• Performing tests
• Procurement activities
• Documentation tasks
• Project-related follow-up work

This can result in lost context and additional administrative effort.

Suggested solution

Add a "Create Task" action directly within a ticket.

Possible functionality:

• Create a single task from a ticket
• Create multiple tasks from a ticket
• Automatically link tasks to the originating ticket
• Copy relevant information from the ticket into the task
• Display related tasks directly within the ticket
• Show task status and completion progress
• Optionally close all linked tasks before a ticket can be resolved

Benefits

• Better separation between incidents/service requests and actual work packages
• Improved task tracking and accountability
• Reduced manual effort
• Clear visibility of all activities related to a ticket
• Better support for larger or more complex requests

A ticket often represents the request itself, while multiple tasks represent the work required to fulfill that request. Creating and linking tasks directly from tickets would make FreeITSM more powerful for day-to-day operational work and project-related activities.

[edmozley]

Hi @dschipfel

Thanks for these amazing ideas - I will look at this one this evening.

Also, I was wondering if you would be open to the idea of being a "case study" that I could put on my main freeitsm.co.uk website? If you'd rather not that's totally fine - I am just trying to think of new ways of raising awareness of the project.

Ed

[dschipfel]

Hi Ed,
Thank you for reaching out and for considering us!
Yes, we would definitely be interested in participating as a case study. Both @dschipfel and @tjedelhauser would be happy to contribute and share our experiences with FreeITSM.
We've been using the platform extensively and have been following its development closely. We believe that sharing a real-world implementation and our feedback could help demonstrate the flexibility and capabilities of FreeITSM to other organizations.
We'd be happy to discuss the details and provide any information that may be useful for the case study.
Thanks again for all the hard work you're putting into the project. We're excited to be part of its journey!

[edmozley]

Amazing! Thank you @dschipfel and @tjedelhauser! Please can you send me an email (ed@freeitsm.co.uk) and we can work out the details.

The kind of thing I have in mind is an intro about both of you (maybe a couple of photos) and your company, the challenges you face and how FreeITSM helps you with those problems in a kind of question and answer format. We can fiddle about with the layout - get your company logo and a link on there if you want so it's a little advertisement for you as well.

My one golden rule is I never criticise other software providers - so even if your old ITSM software was terrible (for example) this would never go in the case study... positive energy only!

[edmozley]

Hi Daniel @dschipfel

This is built and in. Thanks for the write-up - it was clear enough to work from directly.

What you can do now

From a ticket, choose Link to… → Task in the Links bar at the top:

• One box does both jobs. Type what the work is: it searches your existing tasks and offers to create a task with exactly what you typed. So if the job is already on someone's board you attach that one, and if it is not, you make it - without having to decide which of the two you are doing first.
• A ticket can have as many tasks as it needs. Each shows as a pill: ☐ while outstanding, ☑ once done, and a fraction such as 2/5 if the task has subtasks, so you can see how far along it is without opening it.
• A task created this way is assigned to you and takes the ticket's company, so it lands on your own list and alongside the rest of that client's work.
• Right-click a ticket in the list and choose Link to task… to attach one without opening the ticket at all.
• Closing a ticket that still has unfinished tasks warns you, but does not stop you - the outstanding work is often somebody else's by then.
• The ✕ on a pill unlinks, it does not delete. The task carries on living in the Tasks module.

A couple of decisions worth flagging

The ticket's title and company are copied, but not its priority or dates. Two copies of the same information drift apart the moment either side changes, and a task showing a stale priority is worse than one showing none. The ticket is one click away from the task.

There is no new button. The ticket screen is already busy, so tasks became another entry in the Link to… menu that was already there, and task pills sit in the same bar as problems, changes, equipment and everything else the ticket is connected to.

One thing had to happen first. Tasks were previously shared across every company, while tickets have always belonged to one - so attaching the two would have quietly put a task on a boundary that tickets respect. Tasks now belong to a company of their own, a task created from a ticket inherits that ticket's company, and a task and its ticket are not allowed to belong to different ones. If you run FreeITSM for a single organisation, none of that changes anything for you - it is invisible unless you have more than one company set up. If you do, it is described under Multi-Tenancy Progress.

Where it is written up

• Tickets → Follow-up tasks - how it works day to day
• Tasks → Linking - the task's own side of it
• Tasks on a ticket - Developer Guide - the design decisions and the code, if you want the detail

There is also a new section in Tickets → Help → Working with tickets inside the application itself.

Over to you

If there is anything else you want from this particular feature, please let me know. You are much closer to the day-to-day use of it than I am, so if something is missing, awkward, or not quite how you pictured it, say so and I will look at it.