Departments

Departments

A department is a team that handles tickets. Even if your trust has a single helpdesk team, you’ll want at least three:

• IT — devices, accounts, software
• Estates — buildings, fabric, contractors
• HR — people-and-process queries

Larger trusts add Finance, Pastoral, Data, Reprographics, etc.

Why this matters

Departments are the spine of the helpdesk. They drive:

• Agent scoping — who sees what in their queue
• SLA matching — per-department SLA policies attach via the department_id match criterion
• Automation — rules can fire only for tickets in a specific department
• Priority matrices — each dept can have its own (Estates’ urgency thresholds differ from HR’s)
• Routing — ticket templates and catalogue items pin themselves to a department; that’s how new tickets land in the right queue

Without departments, the queue is one undifferentiated soup. With them, each agent sees only their relevant work.

Adding a department

Each department has:

• Name + slug (the slug is used in URLs and in machine-readable references)
• Description — shown on the admin index
• Order — controls display order in dropdowns
• Active — disable a dept rather than deleting; preserves audit trails

You can’t delete a department that has tickets, automation rules, or SLA policies pointing at it. Deactivate instead.

Assigning agents

Users get assigned to one or more departments via Platform admin → Users. The user’s relevantDepartmentIds() controls what they see by default in queues.

A user with no department assignment sees every department (admin behaviour). A user with one or more departments sees only those.

This isn’t a hard security boundary — agents can flip the filter to “All departments” in the queue UI if they need to. It’s a default that keeps queues clean.

Cross-cutting tickets

Sometimes a ticket genuinely belongs to two departments — a printer in a classroom is both IT (the printer software) and Estates (the room access). Pick the primary owner; use Watchers to loop in the other team. The watcher gets notifications without the ticket showing up in their queue.

Renaming

Renaming a department is safe — no data is moved. But the slug isn’t renamed by default; if you change the name and want the slug to follow, edit the slug field too. Beware: anything that references the slug (automation rule conditions, hard-coded saved views) will break.