Completing a Task
In 4me Change Management (ITIL V3) or Change Enablement (ITIL 4) is implemented using Workflows. Although the term 'Change' is common within IT organizations, it is much less common for support domains such as Human Resources (HR), Finance, Legal, Facilities and Marketing, that typically do not come from an ITIL background. For them, the term 'workflow' is much more intuitive. Since the strength of 4me lies in seamlessly connecting all these domains, this naming improves the collaboration between these departments. An example of a typical workflow is the onboarding of a new employee. This workflow will probably have tasks assigned to the HR team, to one or more IT teams (for provisioning IT assets and giving access to IT systems) and to Facilities (to give physical access to the company sites).
Workflows have typically multiple tasks related to them. which the manager of the workflow assigns to the appropriate people. A specialist will find these tasks in his inbox, read the instructions, perform the work that needs to be done and complete the task. It is as simple as that. The specialist working on a task should always remember that the task is linked to a workflow and the workflow can be linked to one or more requests. The links to the workflow and to the request(s) are visible in the task. When you need extra information or when you need a better understanding of the context, you can always click on the workflow link or on the request link(s). And when you have a question for the requester you can set the status of the task to Waiting for Customer.
The exercise hereunder is based on a workflow defined in the context of a non-standard IT change. A non-standard IT change means that something will be modified to the IT infrastructure. And before such a change can be implemented, the workflow manager of the change workflow should evaluate the risk of the change and decide when the change should best be implemented. The workflow manager can assign one or more tasks to a specialist to help him understand the risk and impact of the IT change. Such tasks are called “Risk & Impact” tasks. Alternatively, specialists can be asked to complete a task of the implementation plan. Such tasks are called “Implementation” tasks.
Open task #21358 and review the workflow to which it is related. Now that you understand the workflow, you are able to answer the “Risk & Impact” question as follows:
Replacing all combo box fields throughout the Expense Reporting application with ‘editable combo boxes’ actually requires a little less capacity. Hence, there is already sufficient capacity available for this change to be taken into production.
Using this information, try to complete this task. Make sure that the Copy note to workflow box is checked.
Questions:
How did your update affect the workflow that the task belongs to?
The note that you added to the task was also added to the workflow. That is because the Copy note to workflow box was checked. By making sure that the note is also included in the workflow, everyone who reviews the workflow will see it. This includes the approvers who receive a PDF file with a summary of the workflow when they are asked for their approval.
How did this affect the other tasks of the workflow?
The completion of task #21358 caused the status of task #21359 to change from “Registered” to “Assigned”. The reason why this happened is that task #21359 is the only successor of task #21358.
The following video provides an overview of the exercise: