Improved Algorithms for Service and Customer of Time Entries
When a specialist enters a value in the Time spent field of a request, Xurrent generates a new time entry for this person as soon as the request is saved. Such time entries are automatically linked to the team of the person who registered the time, the service on which the time was spent, and the customer organization for which the activity was performed.
The logic that Xurrent uses to look up the most appropriate team for a time entry has not changed. When the specialist is a member of a single team, it is easy for Xurrent to select the correct one. But even when the specialist belongs to multiple teams, Xurrent uses a comprehensive algorithm to look up the most appropriate team for the time entry.
This algorithm looks, for example, at whether the time entry was registered for a new request, and if so, whether the specialist is a member of the service desk team that supports the account in which the new request is registered. If that is the case, then the team that gets linked to the time entry is this service desk team. If not, the algorithm considers the team to which the request is currently assigned, the team to which it was assigned before it was updated, the team that is linked to the request’s template, the first line team of the service instance that is linked to the request, the support team of this service instance, etc.
To determine the correct service for a time entry, Xurrent now uses a similarly comprehensive set of rules. In the past, Xurrent would simply select the service of the request’s service instance. Now Xurrent uses the team that is linked to the time entry and the affected SLAs of the request to find the service that was affected and for which the team of the time entry actually has a responsibility.
Xurrent then looks up the customer of this affected SLA and relates this organization to the time entry as its customer.
The improvement of these algorithms should make the time entry data a lot more valuable for support organizations that want to use it for internal chargeback or for invoicing their external customers.