Tiered Support in 1 project or many

[Evan Giordanella]

My organization is starting a more formal multi-tiered support model. I have been researching how best to set up this model of support but cannot find any best practices for setting up one project per tier of support or having all tiers in one project with different queues, etc.  Has anyone successfully modeled this system of support that can share their experiences? 

[Mikael Sandberg]

The way we are doing it is to use just one project. Tier 1 is responsible to assign the incoming request to themself and work on the request, or reassign to Tier 2/3 when needed. We also rely on automation to auto-assign some of our requests, like peripheral requests, to designated agents.

[Evan Giordanella]

How does this approach scale? how many agents, etc do you have? 

[Mikael Sandberg]

Currently we have 12 agents (3 Tier 1, 2 Tier 2 & 7 Tier 3) and in the past year we have had close to 12k requests. When we started using JSM a year ago we only had 6 agents.

[Evan Giordanella]

Thanks @Mikael Sandberg ! Do you use workflows / workflows+automation to handle the escalations to the various tiers? Also, do you then use queues or different issue types to keep the tiers organized?

[Mikael Sandberg]

Currently escalations are manually done based on an application directory we have in Confluence, we only use automations for specific requests, like application access and peripheral requests. The process for application access is fully automated for 60 some applications using a combination of Insight, automations, and tray.io. The only time an agent would need to touch those requests would be if access is approved by IT.

Each agent has their own queue, I prefer to use the "All my tickets", the personal queues where initially created for manual reporting and now we are sort of stuck with them. If you have a lot of requests assigned to you I could see the point for each agent to have multiple queues, but we have not reached that point yet.