Kelly,
Years ago, i.e. before any ITSM applications had been developed, Project Remedies developed Service Manager, a Remedy-based application for defining work templates. We later expanded it to also handle approval templates. These templates include parent / child/ grandchild functionality, as many levels as you’d like, and predecessor / successor functionality, as many relationships as you’d like. Service Manager also includes an ad hoc task capability, because of the 80/20 rule. The ad hoc task capability is very cool. With it, any Remedy task can be changed to a parent, with children defined one at a time. I remember a funny story. I had just learned about that the ad hoc task capability can change any ticket to a parent and add children tickets when I received a call from one of our users. He wanted to talk about something else, and when we were done, I asked him if he knew about this capability. He said that he did and they use it all the time. They trained their help desk (it wasn’t a “service desk” yet) personnel on how to use it, and gave them the authority that when they saw an opportunity to define a new process, to use the ad hoc task functionality to define it. When they had the process defined the way they liked it, to bring it to their manager for review. It would then be defined as a template to be used again and again. He and I laughed that this was another example of the user understanding more about the application than the vendor. Defining the predecessor / successor sequence is pretty simple, and all within the application. If you’d like to see how it’s done, please give me a call at 310-230-1722 and we can set up a web demo. Stan w. 310-230-1722 c. 310-428-5748. From: Action Request System discussion list(ARSList) [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Kelly Deaver Sent: Wednesday, January 04, 2017 9:04 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Please Vote my Idea up! - UDM Process Templates don't load sequence or Change task phase ** Hi Listers,, Please have a look at my idea in communities and vote it up if you agree - https://communities.bmc.com/ideas/14820 In the workbooks Change_Process_Setup.xlsx and Task_Process_Setup.xlsx there is no way to import sequence relationships. I've implemented Task Management at numerous companies and they always want to sequence the tasks, not build a flow. Flow building is reserved for SRM. I know that in reality a flow is built behind the scenes but that should be done by workflow not the tedious job of do it your self. The closest thing I have today for Parent to Task is the TMS_LoadAssocationTemplate tab. It allows me to related the tasks to the parent task group or change but the sequence for everything is 1 and then workflow automatically sets it to the next higher sequence based on the order it was loaded, not on the order you are used to in the App Admin Console where you can specify multiple tasks with the same order (simultaneous activation) besides specifying the order so things get done in the right order. If you are loading hundreds of parent/child relationships that leaves you with a large manual job to go fix the sequences. BMC's recommendation is to utilize standard type and define the flow in the flows tab of UDM. That is time prohibitive if you have hundreds of tasks and leads to a support nightmare for editing and using if the customer has always used sequence. Phase is another issue. We utilize phase management in Change. This information seems to be stored in in TMS:SummaryData. Plus there is a hidden value that must be set in the Change Template. The load doesn't even begin to address the phase in which the task should be associated. It appears the load could possibly be altered to load to information to TMS:AssociationTemplate and TMS:SummaryDataTemplate if there was workflow on the load form to pull in all the appropriate GUIDs. This should be a small fix to implement that would produce big results for those creating hundreds of parent child associations. Kelly Deaver [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> (Business mail) [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> (arslist mail) _ARSlist: "Where the Answers Are" and have been for 20 years_ _______________________________________________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org "Where the Answers Are, and have been for 20 years"
