Tech Forum

The service desk at the company where I work has a trouble ticket system for logging & tracking support requests. Jobs, once logged can be assigned to various people for resolution and are tracked through to completion. Unfinished jobs can be escalated to management for attention. Nothing falls through the cracks once it is logged in the system.

Does anybody know of the availability of a similar system for use in Wards & Stakes? It would be very useful if RS Presidents, EQPs, HPGLs, etc could use such a system to submit membership change requests for clerks, rather than handing them slips of paper that invariably get lost or forgotten. I can see that it could easily extend much further to encompass tracking of all kinds of assignments in units.

I would love to know what others are doing/using.

Mark Curtis
Assistant Stake Clerk (Membership)
Gold Coast Australia Stake

MarkECurtis wrote:The service desk at the company where I work has a trouble ticket system for logging & tracking support requests. Jobs, once logged can be assigned to various people for resolution and are tracked through to completion. Unfinished jobs can be escalated to management for attention. Nothing falls through the cracks once it is logged in the system.

Does anybody know of the availability of a similar system for use in Wards & Stakes? It would be very useful if RS Presidents, EQPs, HPGLs, etc could use such a system to submit membership change requests for clerks, rather than handing them slips of paper that invariably get lost or forgotten. I can see that it could easily extend much further to encompass tracking of all kinds of assignments in units.

I would love to know what others are doing/using.

Mark Curtis
Assistant Stake Clerk (Membership)
Gold Coast Australia Stake

There are professional level, paid options available for things like this. For instance, the Church development teams use Jira (http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/) to manage projects, tasks, bugs, etc. Smaller development teams in start up companies use free solutions like Redmine (http://www.redmine.org/) to manage the same sort of needs. I suppose a ward or stake could use a solution like that, but someone technically minded would have to figure out the setup and maintenance of such a solution. There would be some nice benefits though, like email notifications of task assignments and status updates, etc.

MarkECurtis wrote:It would be very useful if RS Presidents, EQPs, HPGLs, etc could use such a system to submit membership change requests for clerks, rather than handing them slips of paper that invariably get lost or forgotten.

Since you raised that particular issue, when I was a clerk, my biggest problem was incomplete information. Things like "they moved out last month". Great.

But without a address or unit, there's nothing that can be done directly, but start a process of attempting to locate a someone before sending them to Address Unknown. So more then likely, the problem would get handed back to the person reporting it since they seem to have the most current information.

Not that I'm trying to put a damper on the idea. My primary concern there is the security of the information. The idea of not letting information fall though the cracks is attractive, since I'm sure much of what's done is because of what's urgent, not necessarily what's important.

And in the example cited, perhaps the issue can be run by each of the quorums and auxiliaries to see if anyone has more information. In that way, it could be a ongoing Ward Correlation meeting.

If there's open source that can be adapted to the vision, perhaps it could speed the adoption into LUWS and answer the security concerns at the same time.

I imagine it could quickly grow beyond just tracking address changes to become a general tool for managing assignments from presidencies through to any kind of request.

Russell's thought about integrating with LUWS is appealing, although I have no idea if there are any open source products that could be used.

Since being called as a ward clerk just over a month ago, I have already thought about implementing something like this. I inherited four assistant clerks and I am still sorting out what each assistant clerk's "job" is, as assigned by the previous clerk.

I work in an IT environment and spend a lot of time each day in a ticket tracking system, so I think it is a natural way to make sure things get done.

If it were possible to build on an existing open source solution and integrate LDS Account authentication, that would be great.

I'd just like to add that if this develops into a community or Church project that I hope someone can take a look at whatever the Church had in mind on beta.lds.org over a year ago. I vaguely remember seeing screenshots of potential applications to be built on lds.org where a bishop could send assignments out to a deacon's quorum president regarding lessons, etc... If there is already workflow or other ideas underway at the Church, even if collecting dust on a shelf, it would be better to start with than from scratch I would think.