Requests lists

[Lyonel]

Hi,

I have a question regarding the requests list. You can easily filter then by request type (service request, incident, change, etc.), by service, team or owner. But when it comes to "status" or more precisely where it is at in the BPM, things are getting much harder.

Is there a way to display the current stage of the BPM in the request list?

Thanks,

Lyonel

[Steven Boardman]

Hi Lyonel

Thanks for your post. 

We have introduced Boards in Service Manager  for representing the progress of requests through there various lifecycle stages as this gives you a much clearer, graphical representation of the stages of say a process, and all requests in flight against it, have you considered or are you using the boards?

This would give you a real time bird's eye view of all of your request's progress against any of your defined business processes.

In the example below, my Change Process i have broken down into the lifecycle stages (events) which are important for me to know as the Change Owner. 

Here i can easily see the Change which have been received, which have been assessed, those with CAB, Approved by CAB and those in progress, review etc. I can also click on the analysts image to filter the board to only show the requests for a specific analysts and the requests assigned to them.  

The lists on each board are completely configurable, and the movement from one list to another on a board can be automated by the business process tool using the Boards nodes options in the business process engine, at the trigger points you want.

https://wiki.hornbill.com/index.php/Business_Process_Workflow

More information on configuring and using boards is available here. 

https://wiki.hornbill.com/index.php/My_Boards

Hope this helps

Steve

[Lyonel]

Hi @steven boardman, thanks for your answer. We are already using boards and I feared that would be your answer... The thing is boards are really great, but not for filtering or searching... For example, when you have a lot of requests, it quickly becomes quite hard to filter on a particular owner or service or catalog item AND at the same time know where in the process this request is.

If I don't make myself clear, let me know and I will try to mock-up something representing the challenges I face.

[Steven Boardman]

Hi @Lyonel

 

Thanks for getting back to us and the further clarification on the challenge you have re using the boards for this. 

In regards to looking at ways we could make improvements in this area i would be interested to understand a little more about your use case and this may help us define what and where we look to add functionality. 

Do you see this as additional functionality which would be used by a manager, who is overseeing requests in flight against a process, therefore more suited to the boards, and having filtering / search options  on the boards would be more beneficial, or do you see this more of an operational challenge for the analysts using the request list view and them needing to see the like of the BPM stage name on the list so they don't need to open each request to view this on each Head's Up Display?

Thanks

Steve

[Lyonel]

Morning @steven boardman, 

To be honest, I see challenges for both. We currently have 730 opened requests (in our old helpdesk, not on Hornbill yet) split across 4 managers. Some teams have 100+ active requests in their lists.

With Hornbill:

- A manager (me for instance) would like to use boards to understand very quickly what is happening. However, I cannot filter on a particular service or team easily

- An analyst (my team and myself for example) need to go into every single request to see where in the process it is at.

What you guys have done for activities is, for me, the perfect compromise / mix of both worlds as you can filter super quickly, have views, toggle types, etc.

I understand this particular board here is hardcoded / static so it is easy for you to code such interface.

I guess the ideal screens would be:

- For boards to have views, request type filters and keyword textbox filter available / something like that:

- For request list to pull out from the associated BPM the name of the current stage and make it available in the fields to display / something like that:

Hope you understand.

 

[Steven Boardman]

Thanks @Lyonel

It all makes perfect sense and the use cases for both analysts and managers are clear.   We have raised change proposals for the enhancements to both the request list (column) and filtering options for the boards.  

The change proposals need to be accepted and then prioritised by the CAB and once this has happened i can post back here when changes for these enter our 90 day development cycle.  

Obviously if other customers would also find these type of enhancements beneficial it would certainly help with the prioritisation, so i would be keen to hear if this would help other customer?

Steve 

[Lyonel]

Thanks @steven boardman for your answer. Looking forward to that then

Your comment about getting feedback from other customers is interesting because I was wondering how can you "boost" on post on the forum to make it more accessible? Is there some sort of Poll mechanism that we can use?

[TrevorKillick]

Hi @Lyonel

You can indeed create a poll, when you create a new topic the top left you can select Poll.



Kind Regards

Trevor Killick

[Lyonel]

Hi @TrevorKillick,

I knew about polls, which is a great feature. I was just wondering if we could apply this to existing posts. But probably not from what I can see.

I will try and post a new one with a poll today (if I find a bit of time) to get more customers feedback and see how it goes.

Thanks guys !

[samwoo]

20 minutes ago, Lyonel said:

Hi @TrevorKillick,

I knew about polls, which is a great feature. I was just wondering if we could apply this to existing posts. But probably not from what I can see.

I will try and post a new one with a poll today (if I find a bit of time) to get more customers feedback and see how it goes.

Thanks guys !

Sometimes on other forums you can ask a moderator to create a poll for you against an existing post... it might be possible here?

Just to add we would find the suggestions useful as well.

Thanks,

Samuel

[Steven Boardman]

@Lyonel @samwoo please feel free to use the polls as @Trevor Killick suggested. 

As we get more support for the ideas raised here, we add customers as connections to the change proposals and this gives us one mechanism to weight which topics / enhancements would benefit multiple customers. Obviously there are other factors which are taken into consideration with our prioritisation but this certainly helps us keep on top of the most requested / supported ideas / enhancement requests.