Introduction to Online Issue Management
Online Issue Tracking Software System
The Breakthrough Solution for Workflow Management, Issue Tracking, and Task Management!
Comindware is a web-based workflow management and issue tracking system with integrated task management and collaboration features.
In the 21st century capitalistic society everyone knows the notion of business. Not a surprise either that computer systems automate many spheres of our life, starting from mobile phones interfaces and internet, up to office tools. What office tools do we know? Mostly it’s Word, Excel, Access, PowerPoint, Email.
They were all invented to make our work at the office quicker and more performing. The essential tool for work now is communication and it’s performed through phones, emails, faxes and personal meetings.
The bigger the business is, the more complicated the process becomes. And, finally, all those tools start impeding the work more than helping it. Numerous emails create a clutter in your inbox, meetings and phone calls become infinite. Something has to be done to deal with it.
Of course, you can hire more workers to deal with more issues. But at some point of its development, business and computing met and online issue management software started to appear on the market.
First and the most common online issue management systems are Issue Trackers. They are called ‘Issue’ because they deal with different Issues.
What can be an Issue?
First Issue Trackers were built for IT (Information Technology) and QA (Quality Assurance) and those activity fields deal with bugs, claims and customer requests. Thus, a bug, a claim or a customer request is an Issue.
An Online Issue Tracker has a scheme of how an Issue is to be worked upon within a business. Such scheme is called Workflow and it is the first step to business process or workflow automation.
Let’s take a customer request. Once it enters the business scheme, the online issue tracker sends it to the professional that has to deal with it. He may process the request or send it to another professional who continues working upon it according to his working profile. In an automated scheme the need to think ‘what do I do now’ is of no need so the time of the request processing is significantly reduced. It’s something like Henry Ford assembly line with the exception that it’s possible to use it for any kind of work, not only car construction.
Issue Management makes a part of Process Management and its goal is timely performing of business operations. It also includes using document tracker to efficiently manage documentation. Our issue tracking software integrates with capex software for budget planning and tracking spending.
In the last decade SMB (small and medium business) and Enterprise have comprehended the advantage of instituting managing systems for document and task steam.
Help desk and ticketing are now a common part of online issue management systems. Other industries and activity fields start to adapt business process software step by step. Yet any contemporary company that doesn’t know yet the benefits of business process automation performs in a such a ‘last century’ way with lots of running, talking and stress instead of orchestrated team work.
It’s not by chance that we mentioned team work. Nowadays, a company may have many teams and sometimes those teams are in different countries and time zones – quite a problem to work together efficiently, communicating only by phone, Skype or email. This is why online issue management systems tend to have a set of collaboration software tools to enhance team performance.
Product or software development
As we have previously said, online issue management systems commonly make part of product development companies business process to work with requests, changes to products, and bugs (defect reports).
An online issue tracker operates with workflows what mostly look like:
[issue enters the workflow] -> [open] -> [evaluation of the issue] -> [work] -> [test] -> [issue closed].
Usually ‘work’ and ‘test’ segments repeat mainly until the issue is closed.
The solutions available on the market are free open source issue management software and there are complicated paid versions that cost a lot but you spare you from the necessity of coding and programming a lot, making the issue tracking programming available for almost everyone.
Online issue tracking system
Online issue tracking system is a computer software solution for managing issues lists. The lists of issues are defined by the organization activity field.
The best example of online issue tracking software is a customer support call center. The center creates, updates and solves issues reported by the customer. Sometimes the center can deal with the issues reported by the employees of the organization. Knowledge base is a part of an online issue tracking system in this case. You have probably noticed that the call center specialists can answer any of your questions. Of course, they don’t keep all the information in their heads, they use Knowledge Base, it is common practice. A KB contains the customer information, common problems resolution and other relevant files and documents.
A Bug Tracker is also one of possible online issue tracking software. Nowadays any good software team uses Bug Trackers as they make it possible for any project team member to collaborate with the others for better performing and problems solving. When an Issue comes into a bug tracker, a ticket is assigned to this case and then it goes through the workflow scheme until the problem is solved and the ticket is closed. Issues can be prioritized according to their urgency and importance and assigned to the professional with the appropriate working skills.
Inside any online issue tracking software we will find the architecture based on a database as the tracker stores the information that emerges during the work. And any online issue tracker makes an issue go through some workflow scheme. Workflow is an automated scheme of processing the Issue from the moment when the team gets it and a ticket is submitted up to the moment when the issue is solved and the ticked is closed.
Nowadays online issue tracking systems start to be used in different activity fields. Systems for Human Ressources, Marketing, Accounting, Construction, Top Management, start appearing on the market. Mostly, there are online issue tracking solutions for one specific activity field and you absolutely cannot use them in any other sphere as they were not programmed with the appropriate flexibility.
Meanwhile a big company may have different departments and if each of them uses a different issue tracking software and those trackers cannot communicate, the whole company work is in risk. This lacuna will probably be covered by recent products that are recently launched on the markets. Those solutions have enough flexibility and scalability to be adapted to any department of any business and even for any business activity field.
Data from other CRM, ERP and suchlike systems must absolutely be easily integrated to the system to provide continuous work to the business. Thus, all company work gets automated as we have seen it on the example of customer support and development.
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