Project management in Zendesk with SweetHawk

Zendesk & project management

While native Zendesk functionality can be used for managing odd tasks, when it comes to planning and managing more complex undertakings that involve many team members and responsibilities across departments, it is difficult to maintain control and visibility over what’s happening. This is where SweetHawk apps like Tasks, Calendar, Timers and Notify can be used in combination with Zendesk to provide improved project management functionality.

How SweetHawk helps you manage projects in Zendesk

Project management is important for any business as it provides an approach to plan, execute, and monitor projects from start to finish. It helps ensure that projects are completed on time, within budget, and with the desired quality.

Zendesk combined with SweetHawk can be used to plan and manage projects. Starting with a Zendesk ticket, any discussion that’s required to define the overall project plan can happen within the conversation. Then the overall details of the project can be collected into ticket fields such as objective(s), budget, risks, stakeholders etc. 

For tracking the status, a “Phase” or “Stage” dropdown field can be used to categorise where a project is at. This in turn allows you to build views and reports to get a sense of where each of your projects is sitting. You can also build workflows off the back of this field to automatically set actions, like re-assigning the ticket, changing the ticket’s priority, or automatically applying tasks appropriate to the phase. 

For planning out the individual tasks to be completed, The SweetHawk Tasks app can be used to build checklists, and for larger tasks that require more input, sub-tickets can be generated and assigned to the different agents who will be completing them. 

For commonly completed projects where steps are known beforehand, the tasks app allows you to automatically apply all of the items to be completed, including being able to spin up pre-defined sub-tickets that also have a set of task lists applied. This ability to automate can help to facilitate large time savings and achieve consistent outcomes. 

The SweetHawk Calendar app can be used to plan out when various stages of a project will be completed. It’s integration with Office365 and Google calendar can also provide transparency for team members who are not agents in Zendesk. Additionally, for time-sensitive undertakings, our Timers app can be used to apply reminders or automatically bump tickets that are running overtime. 

To maintain a general overview of a project, data can flow from child tickets up to the parent ticket allowing you to keep a track of overall time spent, how much of the budget has been used, and the status of each of the sub-tickets being worked on by the team.

Finally, you’re able to build Zendesk Explore reports that pull data in from the project ticket(s) and allow you to slice and dice your project information how you see fit.