I work in web development, that involves a lot of smaller custom projects rather than one large product. Requirements and specifications are always coming from outside the company.

We've setup a ticket tracking system (Active Collab, which is rubbish compared to redmine btw) and given access to clients so they can submit issues. The idea being that less time is taken up with long phone conversations and emails. I think it can work really well if done right.

However I'm not so sure it's always a good thing. Feature requests have gone up a lot on some projects. The system also needs to be friendly to non-developers while having the many features that developers use. Developers' tickets do not always map 1-to-1 with the tickets clients will create.

So the requirements and broader tickets need to be separated from the more specific developer (specification) related tickets. Perhaps we could use two systems, one for clients to submit their requirements or describe a bug, and one for developers to create tickets like implement method x in class y. Maybe this can be achieved by structuring tickets into more appropriate categories or creating sub-tickets under a feature request ticket. I've briefly looked into Pivotal Tracker and it has a fundamentally different workflow.

I would like to know how others are communicating with clients and keeping the technical workflow separate from the non-technical workflow. What tools do you use and how do you use them?