Question

We are a software company that has about 150 clients. Traditionally we have always loaded each client as a "Project" in Fogbugz so we can (1) keep track of the issues reported by each client and (2) assign an account manager as the primary contact to each project/client so that they are aware of what issues their client is experiencing as they get emailed as each case gets assigned to their client.

This has worked really well for us for a number of years as a CRM system. It has meant though that our projects e.g. technical projects have been run in Pivotal Tracker. This has a number of problems as internal feature requests are loaded in Pivotal, but customer reported bugs/feature requests are normally emailed into Fogbugz by a client and then have to be manually copied and pasted into Pivotal.

We would like to standardise on Fogbugz so that client projects and technical projects are all run in Fogbugz.

However, I'm interested to hear suggestions on how we can split out "client projects" from "technical projects" so that the following is achieved:

(1) We can split them into separate menu items on the default.asp?pg=pgOldMainMenu page i.e. a list of client projects and then a list of technical projects. A developer wants to be able to see the open technical projects in one look and not have to pick them out of a 150 item long client project list

(2) That the client projects still assign the account manager as the primary contact so that they can be kept in the loop on the issues their client faces

(3) That a bug or issue reported by a client can be "allocated" to a technical project without loosing its link to the client project. This will allow us know that "Bug xyz is occurring in product abc on client 123's site". That the bug can be "allocated" to product abc so that when fixed it gets into the release notes. But at the same time when closed, can then notify the client that the bug has been resolved. Just editing the case and changing the project won't work as someone will forget and just close the case in the technical project, and the client will never know their issue has been resolved

I've used the term "project" for both client projects and technical projects, but possibly there is a better was to do this. Maybe a custom field? I don't think groups will work as it doesn't solve the problems listed in 1-3.

Any ideas from other users out there?

Answer 1

Here's one way to partially get what you want:

1 start the names of your technical projects with an underscore. then in the home page "Open Cases by Project" the technical projects will all be at the top of the list, making it easier for your developers. You can also get your developers to create filters that have even more meaning to them, so that the list of Cases they are working with is even smaller. Your account managers will look at the "Open Cases by Group" (was by Client pre-FogBugz 7). Nothing to prevent them from using the filters either :)

2 Technical projects are configured with Groups set to Internal, the Primary Contact set to the team leader. Client projects are Group = and Primary Contact =

3 client cases are addressed in very short time frames and are Resolved (Responded) ASAP. If the response is all that is needed, the Case can be CLOSED. If a real bug is found, the response is essentially "we opened a bug which will be fixed ". That Client Case is not closed, and a sub-case in a technical project is opened. Milestones are set in each case to track them, and the Parent - Sub-case relationship helps too. The release notes for the issue go in the technical project. when the milestone is shipped, the account managers then look at all Open, Resolved(Responded) cases in their Client Projects for the recent Milestone and Reply to each of them saying "the fix for your problem has been delivered", CLOSING the Cases.

Answer 2

You might want to take a look at this post. It is requesting an organization level above Project to group your projects together. A customer has written a plugin to do this which is in the gallery, but it needs some work before it is ready for prime time.