FogFanz has an interesting article up about using FogBugz as a Getting Things Done (GTD) tool.
It's a great topic, and one that we talk about here a lot.
A growing number of Fog Creek employees use FogBugz as a GTD tool. Rich, the fellow in charge of our customer support efforts, has designed his workday around a series of lists in FogBugz that give him the next things he needs to do. Filters are the means of constructing those lists.
Since he's not in control of the volume of customer email he gets, our Inbox for customer service becomes his defining task list for the day. Rich and the support team work through the Inbox first. He takes care of these cases in the order in which they arrive, and rigidly enforces the "no cherry-picking" rule because cherry picking makes the whole system break down. You spend (waste) time thinking about what to do with a case several times over, avoid addressing your weak spots, and inevitably answer the customer who tells you how great you are and wait to deal with the one who has the malignant Mono mystery Unix install failure.
To Rich, every case that comes into the Inbox is an opportunity to make that thing never happen again, or at least reduce how often it happens. He spawns off a case in the Fix It Twice area so that it ends up in a trusted system, one of the keys of GTD: You have to capture everything. These are the cases that make those Inbox problems go away forever. These are the cases that will reduce your support volume. These are the cases that will make support staff and customers happier.
Joel has talked about using Five Whys and Fix it Twice on his blog, and we've even been inspired by these guys. Here at Fog Creek Fix it Twice has become a bit of an OCD obsession. Rich has helped us make this less of an ad hoc system.
Anytime there are spare cycles Fix it Twice cases get attention, so when the Inbox is done Rich digs into the Fix it Twice list. This is where the real magic happens, and where Rich has brilliantly gotten support off the treadmill of trying to keep up with more and more support requests. This is where he gets to think creatively about how to fix problems permanently, which also happens to be a nice break from the routine of daily support, and turns support into a strategic role--a thinking-person's job--and a role less prone to burn out.
To us, your GTD "inbox" is NOT the same as your FogBugz Inbox. Your GTD inbox is the Fix it Twice area. The cases in Fix it Twice are the things you will get done, the things that will reduce your support load.
The progression from processing the Inbox to processing Fix It Twice is as close as we've ever gotten to implementing GTD's idea of contexts in a real way. Effectively, it boils down to Inbox is @reactive, and Fix it Twice is @strategic.
Rich has a few extra steps (that he may write about), and has put a lot of thought into this FogBugz/GTD system, making it simple to follow, but powerfully effective in reducing the volume of support problems we encounter.
The point is that he has lists in FogBugz that help him to organize his day's work, and that this melding of GTD thinking with strategic customer service thinking has helped us move away from running to catch up, to more effectively driving the direction of support efforts. If you have a growing customer base and don't make Fix it Twice part of your life, you'll always be trying to run a little faster on a merciless treadmill. That is until something breaks badly--your support staff gets burned out, or your customers become so sick of your inability to help them that they burn you in effigy (or in modern terms, say nasty things about you on Twitter).
There are lots of tools to help you follow GTD, but FogBugz can definitely work in that role. It can work as a personal system, or you can make it work for strategic customer service.
