Viewing call details for changes?

[lee mcdermott]

Hi,

I have a slight problem where all our changes are logged to a change management queue(team) in order to keep all changes together and the actual work to perform the change is by generating an activity which then gets assigned to individual teams as required.

 

this is all fine but it became apparent that all the teams could not access the change call to read what the actual work is based on the original Progressive capture details.

So to overcome this I had to add everyone to be a member of the change management team so they could see the call details.

 

Now as everyone is in that team everyone gets any notifications associated with it when they do not need to know or get these notifications. Which is causing notification overflow for everyone.

My questions is - is it possible to turn these notifications off for specific teams if someone is a member of multiple teams?

Or even better - is it possible to have read\view access to changes in the change queue without being a member of that actual team?

 

thanks

 

lee

[Guest Ehsan]

Hi @lee mcdermott,

Notifications relating to Request Assignment can be turned off using the following Application Settings (Admin Tool > Hornbill Service Manager > Application Settings).

You can add a User as a member of a Request through the "Members" sidebar in a Request page. This provides the User in question with access to the Request. Although, I am not sure if that would be an ideal approach in your scenario Have you considered adding those teams as the Supporting Teams of a Service Portfolio? You can add multiple teams as Supporting Teams of a Service Portfolio, through the "Supporting Teams" sidebar in a Service page. Details on this can be found here - https://wiki.hornbill.com/index.php/Service_Support_Teams.

Thanks,

Ehsan

[lee mcdermott]

@Ehsan

 

thanks Ehsan - yes i have notifications turned on for individual assignments and off for team assignments. Ideally only wanted notifications for your primary team.

 

I haven't come across the supporting teams for a service portfolio - so I will have a read and see if this will help in this situation.

 

i may come back to you with any questions this may raise if I'm not sure how it is set up or works if thats ok

 

cheers

 

lee

[Guest Ehsan]

@lee mcdermott Great, no worries. More than happy to assist if you've any questions.

You can structure and set up the teams relating to Change Management to meet the needs of your organisation. You can then add the relevant teams as supporting teams of a Service Portfolio. You'll then be able to assign a Change Request to any team that support the Service, through the "Assign" action in a Request. This concept grants the members of those supporting teams with access to Requests that are raised against a Service.

Thanks,

Ehsan

[lee mcdermott]

@Ehsan

 

Hi,

Yes I think this would solve our problem.

So I have created a new service called change management as we had never set this up before. i have associated the request config for changes with the BP we use for changes and added the team of System support (wasn't sure if i needed to add the actual change management team or not.

 

I removed a user from the change management team as he was a member to enable viewing of the change.

He is a member of system support team - but when trying to access a change to view it he gets an error of access denied?

 

is there any further config required to set the change service up? I'm not sure how the service knows that all the changes logged are associated with it?

 

Would this only start working for new changes that get logged as all the current changes are not logged as part of this service?

 

Also under workflow I have added RFC as the BPM used to log our changes - is this what will associate the change logged with this service?

[Guest Ehsan]

@lee mcdermott

Yes, this concept only applies to Change Requests that are raised against this Service.

To begin with, the Progressive Capture flow relating to Change Request needs to include a form called "Service details" to allow a User to select a Service while raising a Request.

 

When raising a Request, I am presented with a list of Services that I support.

In the Progressive Capture example above, the step after selecting a Service, is to select an assignment Team / Analyst. I'll only be presented with a list of Teams that support the Service that I had selected in the previous step.

 

When the Change Request is raised, I will be able to see the Service that the Change Request is associated to (Service field in the Information sidebar).

 

There is a lot more that you could achieve through a Service Portfolio. For example, you can see all the Requests that are raised against the Service in one place.

 

You can create packages for a Service through the Catalogs option for Incidents and Service Requests. The purpose of this can be further explored when you open up your Services to your organisation's end-users. Below, I have created a Catalog called "Ask for Help" for the "General Support" Service Portfolio. Through the Portal, end-users can simply raise a Request with the Service Desk by selecting this Catalog.

, when you open up your Services to your organisation's end-users, through the Portals.

 

[lee mcdermott]

@Ehsan

 

Thanks for this - I think I understand now.

However as this will be for changes in this instance and I always want the call to be assigned to the "change management queue"  by adding the option to select the service in the prog capture...could I instead add it to the BPM so it automatically adds it to the change management service and also as it currently does in the BPM add it to the change management queue?

 

It would save the person logging the change having to always select the service of change management as it will always be the same service it gets logged against?

[Steven Boardman]

@lee mcdermott

There isn't an option to select a service in the BP, this is generally because the BP itself is selected when choosing the service (if that makes sense).  The only real exception to this is where you are not using services, and are using a default BP against a request type through the system settings.

If you enabled the Change Management Request type against your different services, this would allow you to define (if required) different BP's for change against different services (or use the same one), it would also allow you to add the relevant Supporting Teams as @Ehsan has suggested to each service, allowing members of those team's visibility of the changes, and also the option (again if required) to assign the change to those teams if needed. But it would still require the selection of a Service 'to change' during the Progressive Capture logging process.

One other approach which you might want to consider is using a single Change BP which assigns the change to your change management queue (team), and instead of having supporting teams viewing the whole change - you could when you are creating your tasks / activities for the teams who are completing work on the change, pass information into the task descriptions from the Change, which will allow the team to complete their task with a sub-set of information from the change (but they would not be able to view the change itself).

To do this you can include variables in the task description which you are setting up in your BP - something like below. 

In my example i have used the BP nodes to get both the Change Request Info, and Get PC Answers before the Authorisation node, which in turn allows me to add variables such as summary, or values in the custom fields, or answers to Progressive Capture questions into the task / approval description)

Which would give you something like this on the task (or approval in my example) 

Now this won't give the team assigned the task access to the change, or all it's content but it might be something to consider, although i suspect the use of supporting teams on services is probably going to work better for you.

If this is of interest, there is more info on the wiki of working with variables:

Request Variables:  https://wiki.hornbill.com/index.php/Request_Variables

Also if you wanted to map Progressive Capture answers into Custom Fields of a request there is more info here:  https://wiki.hornbill.com/index.php/Mapping_Fields_from_Customised_Forms

 

Steve

 

 

 

 

 

[Guest Ehsan]

Yep. You can select your Business Process from the Workflow option through Request Config tab > Change sub-tab. In the Business Process, you can configure an "Automated Task" to assign the Request to the relevant team.