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Increased Visibility of Activities


PSG

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we rely on Activities and use the to request other teams / roles take action for a Request.

we've noticed that Currently Users can see the Activities are assigned to their Team / Role however when an Activity is assigned to an individual user the viability of it is lost.

Please note: one exception to this rule is the user's line manager (set in user's Hornbill profile) - they can see and have the option to to filter on Activities that belong to their subordinates. Could a similar principle be applied to allow team members to see the activities assigned to other individual users that are a member of their Team?

I've attached two screenshots as examples.

The first is when i'm set as my colleague's Line Manager and i can see their tasks.

The second is when i'm not set as my colleague's Line Manager and i cannot see their tasks

Thanks,

Jamie

 

 

 

activity_linemanager.PNG

activity_nolinemanager.PNG

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Hi Jamie,

The way in which Activities work is different to the notion of calls and queues, so once an activity is assigned to an individual, it becomes a task for them to complete. Right now the visibility of the activities is done through the assignment of an activity to a user, group or role so once assigned to a user there is no association of a group or role to the assignment of that activity.  We are trying to find a way of meeting the requirement without turning the activities into a ticket management system, the key requirement is a way to maintain management oversight of tasks that are assigned to individuals and the complexity of this becomes apparent when you gave tasks originating from Service Manager requests, because in Service Manager you also have boards and lists for maintaining oversight of activities.  

The problem we have is making it possible to view these other tasks while maintaining the integrity of the security model applied to the same - I doubt any customer would be happy if someone from IT could suddenly get sight of activities relating to HR just because they were a member of one of the HR groups.  

I am wondering if you can expand a little more on your actual use case(s) and we could possibly find an alternative way to achieve the same end goal.  

Are all of the activities you are looking to maintain oversight of originating from requests in Service Manager?

Gerry

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Hi Gerry,

Thanks for the reply.

I understand the need to restrict visibility of Activities between departments, i.e. IT should not be able to see HR ones.

What we'd like is the ability to see Activities that are assigned to people in the same Team / Role.

It appears that some Activity visibility functionality exists - team leaders can see the Activities assigned to their direct reports. Can this be expanded so members of a team / role can see Activities assigned to other members of the same team / role?

From a practical point of view, we'd like to use this in case someone is off so we can see if they've any work that needs to be completed.

Also, Senior members of a Team need to see the workload of each Team member. 

I hope this makes sense. Please let me know if not.

 

Regards,

Jamie

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Hi @PSG

Yes that makes sense, thank you for expanding.  We are woking on the next round of changed to Activities where we are building out more functionality so I will ensure that this requirement is thrown into the mix and considered, so please watch this space. 

Gerry

 

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  • 1 month later...
  • 1 month later...

@PSG

Jamie,

Thanks for the reminder. I am not sure how much progress has been made to support this, but it has been considered. I will ask engineering and post an update tomorrow to confirm the current status. 

Gerry

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Hi Jamie,

Ok so I had a fairly detailed discussion on this subject today and not sure how we can best approach this.  Discussions are still underway to continue tomorrow so I will post further once I have more to update. 

Gerry

 

 

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@PSG

Hi Jamie,

Right I have gotten to the bottom of this now so I will do my best to explain our thinking. So first thing to note is that the tasks system was designed to deal with individuals and their tasks, and not the management of tasks for teams like you would see on a service desk.  The crux of this means that a task is assigned to EITHER a group OR a USER and not both. Now because a user can be a member of multiple GROUP's its not possible to control visibility of tasks by group, the security and underlying data model would just not allow that.  

So the problem we want to solve is to deal with the visibility (and actioning) of tasks when someone is not available, say for example they are unexpectedly off sick.  So what we are going to introduce is the idea of "delegation" and "switching context".   At a very high level, this is how it would work.

* Each user would have the ability in their profile to set up "delegates", this is where they can name one or more people who they will delegate the rights to view/action their tasks.

* A user that has been given delegation rights to another users tasks would be able to temporarily "Switch" their context to that other users view, so they would see the same view of tasks as the user who has given them delegation rights.  

Hopefully I have explained that well enough - does that make sense? and does that solve your problem?

Gerry

 

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  • 2 weeks later...

HI @Gerry,

Thanks for the update.

I've informed some of our users of the proposed solution and the general consensus it's not 100% what we had in mind (not meaning to sound ungrateful at all) however it is a step forward and will definitely help us. The ability to view and action delegate's Tasks will make our life easier so thank you very much for suggesting it.

One question that was raised - if a delegate completes someone else's activity will the notes / timeline show that the delegate has completed it. For audit purposes it would be good for the notes to show who actions it (e.g. the delegate) rather than who it was assigned to.

 

Regard,

Jamie

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@PSG

I will have to find out about that, my first reaction is no it would not, the task would have information about who completed it, so you could see from the task, but tasks are a platform feature so do not in themselves write back to the Service Manager call records in much the same way as completing an outlook task would not write notes into anything else.    I can see why you are asking that question though and in the context of requests such an audit makes sense. I am not sure how the connection between a task and a request is made, I will have to find out and get someone to post back with an answer. 

Gerry

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  • 1 month later...

HI Jamie,

Yes sorry, I did have a look and it does appear that the platform is "capable", I was not sure if there was an OnTaskComplete event, but there is and its in use so that means we could extend the flowcode to include information about who completed the task in the timeline. I would need to defer up to the Service Manager dev team so they can raise a review and a change request. 

You can see below the current FlowCode handler for the OnTaskComplete event

Gerry

OnTaskComplete.png

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Guest Ehsan

Hi @PSG,

I am pleased to inform you that the work to enhance the content of the Timeline entry that is created on completion of an Activity is already under way.

Capture1.JPG

This work includes, providing the weighting of an authorisation Activity in the Timeline entry which is currently being investigated. The following is an example.

Capture3.JPG

It would be worth mentioning that the Timeline entry is created on behalf of the person who has completed an Activity. Please note in my screenshot that, the Timeline entry is posted on behalf of "Ehsan".

Also, I thought it will be worth mentioning that you can complete an Activity on behalf of the person that an Activity is assigned to, while the option to provide delegates is not available. Details of this can be found in the following Wiki page:

This can be achieved through enabling the following Application Setting (Admin Tool > Hornbill Service Manager > Application Settings > Filter by "app.experimental.advancedRequestTaskCompleter".

Capture2.JPG

 

We will update this post as soon as I can confirm when the work around improving the content of the Timeline entry will be available.

Thanks,

Ehsan

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  • 6 months later...

Hi Jamie @PSG

Apologies for the lack of update. The enhancement to the Timeline content for completed Activities is already available in Service Manager but this enhancement does not yet extend to Authorisation tasks. The reason is that we were waiting for a Platform enhancement, which is now available - so it is now the matter of tackling the change. As this is considered a smaller change, it is likely that this will be tackled very soon. I have added a note to the Change Request to update this forum post with our progress.

Thanks,

Ehsan

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  • 1 month later...

Hi All, 

Didn't want to create a new thread. 

Is there or will there ever be the ability to grant visibility of activities based on the category they are in? A category "owner" so to speak?

For context, we are trying to use activities to capture the various tasks which fall outside of managed projects and service manager requests. We are seeing a benefit but would really like the teams to retain visibility of these types of team tasks once they have been assigned to individual members. As a workaround we are leaving them assigned to teams but I can foresee this getting "messy" as usage increases. 

Thanks for any insight in advance.

Kind regards,

Tom

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Hi Tom,

The tasks where never implemented to behave like a "miniature call", they are really designed to be atomic human actions and so the notion of ownership by a group is not something the underlying data model would support. In Service Manager tasks are associated with requests, and requests can be assigned to groups, or individual users. 

Perhaps rather than being specific about a functional behaviour can you expand more on what you are actually trying to achieve from a business/operational perspective?

Gerry

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Hello @Gerry,

Happy Friday and thanks for getting back to me, understood regarding the design and subsequent data model limitations. I actually remember you explaining the rationale during the Q&A session at Insights last year (it was a question about transference of tasks in employee absence which ultimately distilled down to a desire for a task to be assigned to a Service Manager request itself - assuming this never got any traction?). 

Sure thing, so like a lot of small teams we all wear many hats and our day to day workload is split between BAU and Project work. Unfortunately there are often a lot of BAU tasks which don’t fall neatly into Service Manager (things like server checks, tasks triggered by maintenance etc.; the types of things which get thrown on a personal to do list or jotted down on a desk notepad. Then there are "project" type tasks that don't warrant full project management (OK hands up - if following PRINCE2 you couldn't actually call these projects); the types of tasks which you might be able to complete in the time it would take to spin up all the PRINCE2 project docs or perhaps it might take a considerable amount of time but only involve one or two individuals…

From an operational point of view we want better and more definitive visibility of the workloads of our various team members and I am simultaneously trying to increase usage of the Hornbill platform. This is how I arrived at the idea of using activities to try and manage these tasks which are otherwise "invisible" and only captured in each employee's personal working system/method. 

Kind regards,

Tom

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Hi Tom,

I have asked the question internally and we are having a look. I cannot promise anything because the data model is such that it might be difficult without substantially changing the behaviour of the tasks. We will see, I will post when I have an update. 

Gerry

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  • 4 weeks later...
  • 5 months later...

@PSG

Hi Jamie,

Yes this functionality will be included, the change required is actually quite complicated, and we have to make it so its easy to use and understand. In essence, you cannot make group visibility without assigning to an individual via a group, that's because an individual can be a member of more than one group. So while on the face it, it should be simple, it is actually quite complicated.  It is under consideration though and I expect we will have a solution. Its not in the 90-day commit window at this time because we need to make supporting back-end changes first. 

 

Gerry

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