Please share your experience with managing agents' vacations

[Alexey]

Greeting, I'm looking for ideas on how to handle vacation/sick leave days for my JSM agents.

I have ~18 JSM projects and 7 agents, I saw some apps in a marketplace, but always want to explore first solutions based on core functionalities.

The first that came to my mind is to create automation in each project paired with the Bulk change to catch all comments:

1. If someone created an issue for a Person1 - re-assign it to Person2. ON/OFF that rule and edit Person2's name every time someone going on vacation.
   OR
   Simply change Project Lead as it's a default assignee. I can add any agent since they all are part of the Group which is added in the project's people.
2. Create a filter, to Bulk change assignee in all Person1's issues to Person2 (I can re-do the action later thanks to the project IDs). This is needed if the Client will re-open the old request or add a new comment. 

How you guys solve this?

[Jorden Van Bogaert]

Hi @Alexey 

In our projects we also create an automation rule to change the assignee if there's a response/update on a ticket by the customer for the specific assignee that's on holidays. This works fine for us.

We don't have default assignees on create, but work with status intended for people to pick up unassigned tasks. So for the creation, we don't need anything additionally.

Kind regards
Jorden

[Alexey]

I see, well, since we have 1 project = 1 client = 1 agent scenario, we use Automatic assignee, so fewer automation rules needed.

So you don't re-assign ongoing tasks to the new agent, just keep him informed via automation about any updates where the assigned person who left on vacation?

Thanks for sharing that info!

[Jorden Van Bogaert]

We do re-assign, but only when there's a customer response on the ticket during the absence of the agent. So the automation rule will be triggered when a customer posts a comment or when another update happens on the ticket (such as escalation, etc.)

I do understand that the use case is a little different when all tickets are auto-assigned to agents of course. I'm not immediately sure what the best approach would be in that case. You could simply create an agent queue and make someone follow up on the queue that contains active tickets of agents that are away and make the other agents decide whether they re-assign it to themselves or not.

[Olimpia Estela Cáceres-Brown]

@Jorden Van Bogaert  Do you mind to share your automation rule? I have a lot of tickets assigned to me (basically I'm the only one who handles tkts right now and assign ticket first before working on or Escalate to external team)  I would love to let customers that write a comment to ticket that I am absent and I'll get back to them at my return)

Thanks!

[Jorden Van Bogaert]

Hi @Olimpia Estela Cáceres-Brown 

I think you may have tagged the wrong Jorden ;)

I've quickly created a test project with an automation rule that would fit your case if I understood correctly:

I just went to project settings > automation > Rules > Project Rules > Create rule

Hope this image helps you get started :)

[Olimpia Estela Cáceres-Brown]

@Jorden Van Bogaert 

Thank you for letting me know.  The tag is fixed now!