Question

Is there an eaiser way to calculate Workflow Tab Action Assignments?

  • 2 September 2022
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  • samkat
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Hi, we are working with Change Templates and are trying to get the workflow tabs to populate based on a “calculation” or sorts, meaning based on the value of another field in the ticket. We have it kind of working by setting the “Populate values from other action items” but the workflow gets super messy/complicated really quickly. I’m wondering if anyone has any tips or recommendations to help us make this simpler.

 

Here is some more details to try and paint the picture. We have the fairly standard ITIL changes for Normal, Emergency, Standard but this example is for “Normal” changes. For our Normal Change process we require Approval, and that level of approval and person to approve is different depending on certain conditions within the ticket. For example;

  1. A Normal change that has a “High” risk and has “Cost Associated” would require both Person A AND Person B to Approve.
  2. A Normal change that has a “High” risk but no “Cost Associated” would require either Person A OR Person B to Approve

There are other determining factors as well, so you end up with a lot of dependencies determination. The way we attempted to do this was by having an “Approval Calculation” Action Item to start the Approval Workflow Tab, that populates the data from those needed fields, auto-completes, and would activate the Approval associated.

Here is some screenshots to hopefully help paint the picture.

Are we going about this wrong? We want to avoid having too many Change Templates to choose from, and we cant use the Category field to determine the template since its limited to three.

 

I appreciate any and all feedback or help! Let me know if I can clarify on anything.

 

3 replies

Sela Weinrob
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Hi @samkat ,

something is a bit unclear to me, 

you wrote that you need these conditions:

  1. A Normal change that has a “High” risk and has “Cost Associated” would require both Person A AND Person B to Approve.
  2. A Normal change that has a “High” risk but no “Cost Associated” would require either Person A OR Person B to Approve

to apply in order to make the workflow take a specific route.

I can’t seem to figure out why you didn’t put these fields as dependencies - something like that for example:

If you end up with a lot of dependencies you can create a first action item that will get everything from the ticket and then run an individual dependency on the next action items.

That being said, perhaps I’m missing something.

Please elaborate if possible. 

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Hi @Sela Weinrob thank you for your response, the reason in my delayed response was we were not upgraded to the most recent version so I was stuck with the old view for setting dependencies. Thew new view is certainly easier. We are still having some trouble though and hopefully you can help.

 

It seems like the dependencies for an Action Item tab can only be determined by one Action Item, is that right? I thought we would be able to create another ‘group’ and say it depends on that action item as well. For example,

If our Approvals tab has action items for three different people, and in some scenarios we only need 2 of the 3 Approvals in order to Activate but they could be one or another person for the first approval, how can we do this?

In the below screenshot what we are trying to configure is Approval Summary Dependencies of;

Depends on Workflow Tab Approval > Depends on Action Item IT > On Completion with the CONDITION Approved is Yes

OR

Depends on Workflow Tab Approval > Depends on Action Item ICT > On Completion with the CONDITION Approved is Yes

AND

Depends on Workflow Tab Approval > Depends on Action Item Leadership > On Completion with the CONDITION Approved is Yes

Since the first two approvals are different action items, we cant do both AND as well as OR statements

 

Thank you again for your help

Sela Weinrob
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@samkat well we can’t do that directly currently but what you can do is create a “connector” action item that  will be completed automatically and got only one field and it will be activated only if one of the two action items that got the OR condition is completed.

Then you can make it so that “Approval Summary” is opened only if the “connector” AND “Leadership” are completed and approved. 

I’m assuming that this is what you tried to show in the screenshot of the process.

If you have multiple ANDs you can try to combine them to one connector and multiple ORs to one connector in the end of every tab and then just use them to decide which is the next action item.

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