Helpdesk workflow

Helpdesk manages the process of submitting and attending to service or help requests. Each job goes through the following process
1>The help or service request is submitted. This can be done directly by the user who is making the request, or on the user's befalf by a technician or administrator. For more information, see Helpdesk role:
Helpdesk User Roles
Helpdesk understands three groups of users, called roles.
Normal User role
Normal users are the service request clients. As a user, you have the ability to enter service requests and to view the status of your help requests. You may also receive email notifying you of certain changes to the status of your request(s).
Technician role
Technicians are the people servicing the requests. Technicians have the ability to monitor the job queue, allocate and update jobs, and close jobs when completed. They may also receive email notifying them of new jobs and jobs allocated to them for attention.
Administrator role
The administrator role is responsible for maintaining Helpdesk and changing Helpdesk's configuration

2>The newly submitted job is added to the active jobs queue as an unclaimed job. In other words, the job has not yet been assigned a technician.
3>Each technician sees their own jobs and all unclaimed jobs in the job queue.
4>The job is assigned to a technician by the administrator, or is claimed by the technicians themselves.
5>The job can be updated any number of times to reflect the work performed, expenses incurred and the current status of the job.
6>The job can be transferred from one technician to another at any time.

7>If the job takes too long, Helpdesk will escalate the job. This results in the colour changing and an escalation message being sent to the designated person, who may be the Helpdesk administrator, or a supervisor or manager. For more information, see Helpdesk escalation:
Job Escalation in Helpdesk
What is escalation?
When a job has not been completed within a certain time, extra attention may be required. Escalation allows these jobs to be brought to the attention of the Helpdesk administrator or the relevant manager.
How Helpdesk handles escalation
Helpdesk escalates jobs according to the priority assigned to the job when it was first entered. Helpdesk considers both the controllable and the total elapsed time since the job entry and will escalate jobs which exceed the standards on either of these criteria.
When Helpdesk detects a job exceeding the escalation limits, it generates an email message that is sent to one or more designated mailboxes. This work is performed by the escalation component.

8>When the technician believes the job to be complete, they submit a completion report.
9>Helpdesk sends an email to the user with hot links for the user to sign the job off, if the issue has been fully resolved; reject the sign-off if not; or defer a response until a future date.
10>If the user signs the job off, then the job is removed from the queue and archived. If the user rejects the job as not complete, it is returned to the queue for the attention of the technician who closed the job.

Sources:http://www.intexnet.co.za/UserGuide/workflow.htm