Task Follow Up

[Darren Rose]

Hi, I wasn't sure if to add this to Collaboration, BPM or  Service Manager... 

When using the follow up option on a task, and setting a new date, would be possibly to have a way of supress the the BPM from carrying on until the new follow up task is completed? 

Maybe pictures would help explain

In the below BPM, the human task called Review Summary & Documentation was marked for followup in 3 months time. A new Review Summary & Documentation  task was created with a due date of 3 months time. All good. However, the Change Approval task was also created. What I was hoping would happen is that using the follow function essentially paused the BPM until that task was done, but it takes the task as complete instead and the BPM moves on. 

Have I missed something in the configuration, or is that how the system is designed to work? 

Thanks

Darren 

[Gerry]

@Darren Rose

That would be quite difficult to achieve in any sensible way with the BPM I think.  The BPM is the orchestrator, so when designing your process you are pre-determining the tasks that are created, and more specifically the outcomes of those tasks. So if you had a follow-up task and you wanted that to pause/affect the flow of the process you are notionally changing the workflow.  

The only way I could see that working is if we added a notion of a dependant task. Like a follow-up task you would create a dependant task, once created the parent task (i.e. the one that the BPM originated) could not be completed.  For the parent task to auto-complete based on the dependant task you would still need to capture the outcome so that would mean either going back to the parent task and complete it manually once the dependant task has been completed, or somehow delegate the outcome selection to the dependant task. 

Having thought through this there is no *unmessy* way that I can see to make this work in a way that makes sense.  

Now I am trying to understand what you want to achieve from a business process point of view. If you need to do a follow-up in three months time, you can create an outcome called "Followup Required" and branch in your BPM to then create the follow-up task.  Because the task is being created by the BPM then it can wait on that tasks.  You can use parallel processing in BPM if you want to do other tuff while that task is outstanding. 

Basically, when completing a BPM originated task, you should not use follow-up if you need the BPM to continue to orchestrate your process

Hopefully that adds some clarity, I am not sure if I understood your need or I have added to your confusion

Gerry
 

[Darren Rose]

Hi @Gerry

That does make sense, and tbh I hadn't designed the BPM in mind with people using the follow up option in the way they did, but you can never account for the myriad of ways people will try to use the tool and test you

For now, I think we'll manage it through education on how to use the tool, rather than try and build it into the BPM. Like you say, it could get very messy, very quickly otherwise

thanks 

[Steve Giller]

Wouldn't having a decision node based on the outcome of the Human Task effectively pause the BP?
Then the "Review Completed" outcome would flow through the the Change Approval and the "Expired" outcome would branch into some kind of "Why haven't you reviewed this?" section.

[Gerry]

Steve,
Yes and No, its up to you.  If you do the task as a parallel task then no, other parts of the process can continue.

Gerry