Ativities assignment / reassignment

[Adrian Simpkins]

Hi All

Just wanted to see if anyone else has found a solution to an issue I have with activity assignment within requests.

Currently our business process are set to assign activities to the Owner of the request which in most scenarios is fine, but if a request needs to be assigned to another team, the activity still sits with the original owner (as expected). However, if the request is assigned to another team to resolve, the business process is not completing as it is waiting for the activity to be completed and this is sitting with the original owner before reassignment.

I was interested to know if anyone else has had the same scenario occur and if so, how to circumvent the activity issue please? Currently we can only set an activity to be the owner or a team, but both of these options will still leave the activity sitting with the original owner if the request has to be reassigned to another team. Basic flow as below:

- call raised

- call assigned to team

- call picked up by analyst within team, at which point the activity gets assigned to the owner

- Owner reassigns request to another team

- Other team resolves request, but as the activity is still assigned to the original Owner the business process does not progress (send email to customer, and move to the 5 day auto closure process),

I am currently handling this by closing requests that are in a resolved state for more than 5 days, and do not auto close which is fine in the interim. However, long term I would prefer not to have to do these daily checks to pick up any requests caught in this scenario

Many thanks as always !

[Martyn Houghton]

@Adrian Simpkins

We have a 'Pending' outcome on our main activities, which in essence completes the activity and then spawns the same activity again after picking up the new owner for tasks via a Get Request Information node.

Cheers

Martyn

[Adrian Simpkins]

Hi Martyn

Thanks for the above, so I wanted to double check how this would work - currently most activities just have 'Completed' as the Outcome until we begin to develop our business processes further.

So would I insert a 'Pending' Outcome here to sit alongside the 'Completed' Outcome? Who would complete this Pending outcome - would the person reassigning the request still need to complete something on the activity? Ideally I just want them to reassign the request without having to do anything in the activity. I did consider a review activity at the start to allow them to reassign the request but this would not work as I would have to hard code every team I presume in the BPM, then give an outcome to push to each team? or is this a setting on the activity nodes I have missed?

Thanks !

[Martyn Houghton]

@Adrian Simpkins

Normally the person re-assigning the request completes the activity in their name choosing 'Pending', however as we assign the 'Advanced Request Tack Completer' to the role we use for our analyst, they person to whom it is assigned to is able to complete the activity even though they it is not assigned to them.

You could just get away with using the role, without the pending activity if you like, but we decided to go with the outcome as well.

The system does record who completed the activity not who was assigned it.

Cheers

Martyn

[Adrian Simpkins]

Hi Martyn

Thank you for the pointer - I am having issues just getting staff to complete activities so putting in the pending value will probably not work as the staff are not looking at the activities! However, allowing the above action will alleviate a number of issues - I will check further and look to turn on this feature

Many thanks !

[Adrian Simpkins]

Hi Martyn

Just looking at the Roles but I could not see the above role - was this a custom role you setup?

Thanks

[Steve Giller]

@Adrian Simpkins If you use @Martyn Houghton's method and set webapp.view.ITSM.serviceDesk.requests.resolve.denyWithOpenActivities to ON then they'll have no option but to look at the activities.

You may need to have app.experimental.advancedRequestTaskCompleter set to ON in order to use that role.

 

[Adrian Simpkins]

HI Steve

Thanks for the above.

However, I am not sure this will resolve the issue I have whereby Activities are assigned to a User who then reassigns the request to another Team. The activity stays with the original Owner, so when it comes to Resolving the person working the request would have to ask the original owner of the request / activity to action it. Because of the locations of teams and various workloads this will create an overhead to resolving a request - ideally if the role Martyn mentioned above is available this will allow the person the request was reassigned to to complete the outstanding activity without having to contact the original Analyst/Owner.

My only other option would be to remove activities completely from the BPM's so they do not get stuck with the initial owner.

Many thanks