Tasks/Activities - Amendments

[Chris Winship]

We are currently going through our onboarding phase for a new environment and have noticed that Tasks are missing some functionality we require.

• Ability to edit Task titles.
  • We are designing tasks in our BPMs so the requirement for amendments will be lessened, but this will still be required for our analysts. I've been unable to find a setting to enable this anywhere so unsure if I've missed something, or whether it's just locked down by default.
  • If we create a task manually this functionality works.

 

• A notes section on Tasks.
  • Whilst I understand that Activities are designed to be opened and completed straight away. That is just not the case in our environment for our analysts and I'm sure we are not alone.
  • Our analysts manage their workload via "Activities" and not "Service Requests". Service Requests are not used to manage individual actions, as that is what "Tasks" are for.
  • The Service Request provides us an overview perspective of all the activities and provide the correct routing and flows for activities and emails to happen at the right time.
  • We have activities which require communication between analysts and customers/managers for example, to arrange collection time to issue or to retrieve hardware, or to arrange an update to permissions etc. These could be one of many tasks created on a Service Request (e.g Starter Requests).
  • I appreciate that notes could be added to the Service Request, but this doesn't quite work when you have a multitude of activities for various areas within IT who may need to be updating that based on comments they need to make. The comments are very bespoke to the specific task at hand are not really suited to Service Request itself. Not to mention that if you load an Activity, you then have to go scroll through the Service Request to see if there is an appropriate comment for your task, when it could be filled lots of other comments from other tasks.

The ability to do this is quite a big deal for us going forward. Please could this be something that could be looked into?

[Gerry]

@Chris Winship

Hi Chris,

As I read your requirement, from what I can read, I think you are wanting to use Tasks as small tickets.  In other words, you want the ability to open a task, update the task (notes) by which I think you mean like the timeline on the request but just for that individual task and ultimately complete that task?

We do get asked to add "ticket-like" functionality to tasks but we see tasks as "a human task" and a task as an instruction to complete a specific task.  If more interaction that that is required, then we would see tickets (like incidents, problems etc..) would be the right alternative to create rather than tasks.  I guess what I am saying is we don't want tasks to become tickets in their own right.   

How you are using service requests is exactly right, like a "container" for the running fulfilment processes and a top-level view, that makes sense. 

So I wanted to ask, why not use Incidents (or other ticket types) rather than tasks?

Gerry

[James Ainsworth]

4 hours ago, Chris Winship said:

Ability to edit Task titles

Hi Chris,

For this particular element, it is correct that tasks that are created as part of a BPM Automation, don't have the option to edit.  The reason behind this was that a BPM designer could provided automated tasks to accomplish something in particular and if an agent could change the title and other information, they could redefine the task to be something else from what it was originally intended for.  In the history of the ticket, it may also make it challenging if the title of the task has changed.

One thing that can be very helpful is that you can use variables to construct the title of the task.  This means that you can provide a bit more context between the ticket and the task by taking information held in the ticket and adding it to the title.  

Regards,

James

[Steven Boardman]

@Chris Winship just to add to Gerry and James comments above - could you confirm who the Tasks are currently assigned too?  are these users full Service Manager subscribers, who can already see other ticket records, or are they used by users who don't have full Service Manager subscriptions and therefore can't access details in service manager tickets?