Setting dates when putting request on hold

[DougA]

We're trying to automate (or at least streamline) some of our processes and I'm struggling a little. We receive outage notifications from our 3rd party suppliers with date/time start of outage and either date/time of restoration or duration of restoration. We want to put the request on hold but the on hold period doesn't allow a date to be entered at all, only a duration from now. Our next thought was to create a task which allows a date to be entered or a period from now.

Neither really works, the ideal would be to have start date (defaulting to today) AND duration. Calculate the date from the start date plus the duration. For instance if the outage is starting on 14/2/17 enter that as the start-date. If the duration is -1 week this would set the task start date as 7/2/17.  Hey presto we have a warning notice!

Any thoughts?

[DougA]

Is there any way round this? I really need to be able to put an incident on hold until a given date. As I said adding the base date into the date calculation form would make this incredibly useful.

[Steve Giller]

How are you receiving the outage notifications, and what method are you using to convert those into requests?

[DougA]

Hi @DeadMeatGF,

Notifications normally come in via email and we process them manually but I'm trying to automate the process.

For example, Virgin has advised us of a system outage on the weekend of 25/26th. We then collect all of the relevant info and send out an advance notification.

Service Provider
Contact Info
Date/Time From
Date/Time To
Which systems are affected
Who is Affected - everyone, some or all of the fire stations. If a fire station is affected then we also have to inform Control. If Control will be affected then we also have to notify our failover partner fire services. All of this has to be recorded so putting it into Hornbill makes good sense.

Having the ability to then put the incident on hold until the specified date/time From would be great. At the moment you can only put an incident on hold for a duration which is a bit of a pain. An improvement would be allow a variable as per most other duration fields but the ideal would be have a base date and a duration for all date calculation fields.

Yes, I could accomplish this by adding extra data/time fields but even then it would be great to be able to calculate the date.

[Steve Giller]

Assuming the email is in a consistent and strict format you should be able to log a call from email and collect all the relevant information using regex functions - a chore in itself, but once it's done you can forget how much you hate regex!

I agree - there seems to be no way to automate placing on hold in any practical sense, the next best thing I would be trying to do myself would be to populate the request from the email, and also pull the date from the email and create a Human Task to place the call on hold - at least then you can use the pop-up to set a specific date/time.

[DougA]

The notices come from many different sources so we accept we'll have to obtain and log the information manually.

The incident can be put on hold but only for a specified duration. It would be a major improvement if a variable could be selected for a specific date as is done in Lifespan settings in Human Tasks, Authorisation tasks and others. Even better would be to have the base date AND duration in all date fields.