Task Component for Tickets with Automation and Completion Enforcement

Summary
Add a task component to tickets so agents can break work into discrete, trackable subitems within a single ticket. Tasks should be creatable manually or automatically via the automation engine (e.g., a new-hire onboarding ticket auto-generates the standard checklist), assignable to individuals or groups, and — when configured — required to be completed before the parent ticket can be closed, with optional notes captured on completion.

Problem
Tickets today are treated as a single unit of work, but many real requests are actually a sequence of steps handled by different people or over multiple days:

Multi-step work has no native structure. Onboarding a new employee involves provisioning a device, creating accounts, assigning software, delivering peripherals, and scheduling orientation. Offboarding is similar in reverse. Device deployments, incident follow-ups, and refresh rollouts all involve multiple discrete steps. Today these live as free-form comments, checklists pasted into the description, or separate tickets that lose their relationship to the parent request.

No accountability at the step level. When work is buried in a comment thread, it's hard to see what's done, what's outstanding, and who owns each piece. Handoffs between agents rely on people reading the whole ticket history.
Nothing prevents premature closure. A ticket can be closed while individual steps are still incomplete, either by mistake or because the closer didn't realize other work was still pending. There's no enforcement mechanism to make sure every required step actually happened.
No way to standardize repeatable processes. Onboarding should look the same every time, but today each agent recreates the checklist from memory or from a document outside the system. New agents miss steps; process changes don't propagate reliably.
No native tie-in to automations. The unified Automations hub (proposed separately) is the right place to auto-generate the checklist when an onboarding ticket is created — but there's nothing on the ticket side for it to generate into.

Proposed Solution

Tasks as first-class subitems on tickets. Each ticket can have zero or more tasks, shown in a dedicated section on the ticket view. Each task has:

Title and optional description.
Assignee (individual or group), independent of the parent ticket's assignee.
Status (Open, In Progress, Completed, Skipped/N/A, Blocked).
Optional due date.
Optional required-notes flag — when set, the task cannot be marked complete without a note explaining what was done.
Ordering (sequence) and optional dependencies (task B can't start until task A is complete).
Completion metadata (who completed it, when, and any notes).


Manual task creation and templates. Agents can add tasks ad-hoc or apply a saved task template (e.g., "Standard Onboarding," "Device Refresh," "Offboarding") that populates a predefined checklist in one action. Templates are managed centrally so process changes propagate everywhere.
Automation-driven task creation. The Automations hub can create tasks as an action — when a ticket is opened in the "Onboarding" category, automatically attach the onboarding task template; when an incident-linked ticket reaches a certain status, add follow-up tasks; when a ticket is assigned to a specific team, add that team's standard intake tasks. Tasks can also trigger their own automations (e.g., notify a group when a specific task is completed).
Completion enforcement on ticket closure. At the ticket-type, category, or template level, admins can configure whether:

All tasks must be completed (or explicitly marked Skipped/N/A) before the parent ticket can be closed.
Only tasks flagged as "required for closure" must be completed.
No enforcement (tasks are informational only).
Attempting to close a ticket with outstanding required tasks surfaces a clear message listing what's still open.


Notes and audit trail. Every task completion, skip, reassignment, and status change is captured in the ticket's activity log with user and timestamp. Required notes are stored with the completion event and visible on the ticket.
Visibility and reporting:

Progress indicator on the ticket (e.g., "4 of 7 tasks complete").
Task views scoped to the current user or group ("my open tasks across all tickets").
Reporting on task-level metrics — average completion time per task type, most frequently skipped tasks, bottlenecks in multi-step processes.


Assignment flexibility. Tasks assigned to someone other than the ticket owner appear in that person's queue without transferring the whole ticket, so specialized steps can be routed to the right people without losing the parent context.
Optional user-facing visibility. Admins choose whether tasks are internal-only or visible to the ticket requester (useful for onboarding, where the new hire may want to see progress; less useful for internal-only steps).

Who Benefits

Help desk and support agents — clear structure for multi-step tickets; no more free-form checklists in comments.
Onboarding and offboarding coordinators — repeatable, enforced processes that don't rely on any one person's memory.
Team leads and managers — visibility into where multi-step work is stalling and which steps take the longest.
Specialists (network, security, procurement, facilities) — receive only the tasks that require their involvement, without owning the whole ticket.
Requesters (when tasks are visible) — a clear picture of what's happening with their request and what's still pending.
Auditors and compliance officers — a defensible record that every required step was completed, by whom, when, and with what notes.
Leadership — process consistency across agents, sites, and time.
Automation authors — a meaningful target for the Automations hub, unlocking end-to-end workflows like "new hire ticket → full onboarding checklist → notifications on each completion → auto-close when done."

References / Comparable Implementations

Jira — subtasks and checklists on issues, with completion requirements enforceable via workflow validators.
ServiceNow — catalog tasks and workflow tasks attached to requests, with routing to different fulfillment groups and closure gating.
Zendesk — task-list apps and checklist add-ons that gate ticket closure on completion.
Freshservice — built-in tasks on tickets and change records, with assignment and status independent of the parent.
HubSpot Service Hub — tasks associated with tickets and contacts, with automation-driven task creation.
Asana, Monday.com, ClickUp — general-purpose precedents for subtask models, dependencies, and template libraries.