Cross-team workflows in GLPI: HR, IT, and finance in one system

Onboarding a new employee touches three teams: HR (contract, organisational placement), IT (account, laptop, access), and finance (budget, purchase approval). Without a shared system it's an email chain in three copies that falls apart the moment any participant takes a holiday. GLPI provides the coordination layer through parent-child tickets across entities, where each team sees its own slice and the HR manager sees overall progress without phoning around.

Entities as team divisions

The first step is the right entity structure. An entity in GLPI isn't a tenant — it's an organisational unit. For a cross-team scenario, model one parent entity "Company" with child entities "IT", "HR", "Finance", "Facility". Each team has its own technicians, ticket categories, SLAs, but can see tickets across entities if their profile has recursive rights.

Configuration under Administration → Entities:

Company (root)
├── IT
│   └── L1 / L2 sub-groups
├── HR
├── Finance
└── Facility

The "Onboarding manager" profile has recursive access from Company downwards — they see tickets in IT, HR, Finance. The "IT technician" profile only has access to the IT entity. That guarantees isolation (HR doesn't see all IT tickets) while enabling cross-functional coordination for those who need it.

Parent ticket as coordinator

The onboarding workflow starts when the HR manager creates a parent ticket in the "HR" entity with category "New employee onboarding". This ticket carries the metadata: name, start date, department, manager. From it, child tickets branch off:

• Child #1 in entity "IT": "Prepare workstation, M365 account, VPN" — category IT/Onboarding, assigned to a technician from the IT group.
• Child #2 in entity "Finance": "Approve €1500 workstation budget" — category Finance/Approval, CFO assigned as validator.
• Child #3 in entity "Facility": "Allocate desk in open-space" — category Facility/Workplace, assigned to the facility manager.

The parent → child link is set in the Linked items → Add → Ticket → Parent tab. The parent ticket CANNOT close until the child tickets are resolved (configured under Setup → General → Linked tickets behavior).

Automated child ticket creation

Without automation the HR manager would manually create three child tickets every onboarding. Solutions:

• Formcreator with multiple targets — the onboarding form creates the parent + 3 child tickets in one go (each in a different entity). Cleanest approach for standard onboarding.
• Business rule — when a ticket is created with category "HR/Onboarding", a business rule fires an action that auto-creates child tickets in other entities. Better for more dynamic scenarios.
• Webhook + script — for complex cases (e.g. onboarding with five DocuSign documents), where GLPI stays the coordinator but external systems do the work.

Tracking progress across teams

The HR manager needs one view: What's the onboarding status? In GLPI you achieve that two ways:

1. Parent ticket detail in the Linked tickets tab — shows all child tickets with their statuses. One screen, done.
2. Custom dashboard under Setup → Dashboards — a widget "Onboarding tickets with open children" filters parent tickets where at least one child is open. The HR manager opens it in the morning and sees what's stuck.

Other cross-team scenarios

• Offboarding — IT (deactivate accounts, collect HW), HR (paperwork, exit interview), Facility (return keys, desk), Finance (final settlement).
• Department / role change — IT (access right changes), HR (contract update), Management (approval).
• Purchase over €5,000 — Requester (request), direct manager (validation), CFO (budget approval), Procurement (purchase execution), IT (asset registration).
• Security incident with GDPR impact — IT (technical remediation), Security (investigation), Legal (regulator notification if relevant), Communications (customer communication).

GLPI isn't a BPM platform like Camunda or Pega and shouldn't be. For rigid long-running processes with dozens of states, better tools exist. But for the typical cross-team operations of a mid-sized company (5 – 20 states, 2 – 4 teams), GLPI gives you exactly what's needed: one record of truth, visibility across team boundaries, an audit log, and no extra integration project.