Enhancement: Create "Triggers" in so workflows can auto-activate an AutoTask at any time

[Berto2002]

I see a need to have a kind of trigger process acting on some Requests that "watches" a Request through it's workflow and fires-off an AutoTask if certain criteria are met. The key difference between this suggestion and any existing "decision" node is that it is 'floating' and can fire at any time. Hornbill Service Manager has a great strength in the workflow approach but it has a weakness in that it does not provide for those circumstances which cannot be predicted.

Use case:

We have set-up our Major Incident process to perform a number of actions for an MI that don't happen for normal Incidents such as:

1. Set-up a Teams Channel for collaboration
2. Email the Ops Management team for immediate awareness
3. Prefix the Summary
4. Create a Problem record (later used for Tracking causes)

But the above flow is configured to follow-on from the initial logging of an Incident with Priority Major. Once that point is passed, changing the Priority to Major has no effect and we rely on manual efforts again. It is quite often that an Incident comes-in quite innocuously from a user as a Medium or High Priority and we then need to move it up AFTER triage. I am working on an AutoTask that we can use for these four actions but it will still need someone to press the button.

My suggestion is that a new Feature of, say, "Triggers" could be added (in a similar way to Custom Button functionality) and the criteria in Triggers would not show a button but would fire the AutoTask directly if the criteria were met. I would configure it to fire on:

1. Request Type = Incident
2. Status = NOT Resolved, Closed, Cancelled
3. Priority CHANGED TO Major

Other use cases:

1. How about having one that looks-out for various user responses like "escalate", "not happy", "supervisor" and have that Trigger notify the Service Desk Manager that something could be going wrong with the customer interactions on that ticket?
2. If a Change is raised on a certain Service or is linked to a certain Service during it's lifecycle, certain notifications can be made to stakeholders

I agree it is potentially possible to think through when these AutoTask processes might be run and to duplicate elements of the workflow in the core BPM on a "what if" basis. But that requires a lot of work and duplication. Interestingly, it would be easier if it were possible to move back to other stages of a BP because we could configure have regular "loop-back and check" cycles which would only act if certain criteria had been met since the last check.

I would be interested if other users can also see usefulness in this feature idea or would have other ideas for how/where it would be most useful.

[Steve Giller]

16 minutes ago, Berto2002 said:

It is quite often that an Incident comes-in quite innocuously from a user as a Medium or High Priority and we then need to move it up AFTER triage. I am working on an AutoTask that we can use for these four actions but it will still need someone to press the button.

If you're "pushing the button" to raise the Priority could you not have "Major Incident" as a Custom Button which fires an Auto Task that raises the priority to Major and does any other actions you require?

[Berto2002]

Yes I am working to move those actions out of the workflow and into a custom button. But the point here is that it remains manual to action it whereas my suggestion is that a Triggers functionality could be a very effective automation tool for workflows that should be automated but do not happen at a set time in the Request lifecycle.