BPM, Workflow, and Case

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  • 1.  Possible people substitution solutions or ideas?

    Posted Fri November 06, 2020 04:52 AM
    Hi All,

    I'm curious what kind of people substitution solutions are you using when it is not possible to assign a task to a team but to a given user who is on holiday? As I know, there is no built-in feature for this, we have to implement an own solution. Am I right?

    Thx,

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    ____________________
    Laszlo
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  • 2.  RE: Possible people substitution solutions or ideas?

    Posted Mon November 09, 2020 02:19 AM
    Hi Laszlo,

    it is correct that there is no feature in BAW to know if a user is out of office or to react on this information.
    Team filter services are meant to help with that: You can assign a task to a team and apply associate a team filter service to that assignment. In your TFS code, you can reach out to outlook, work-day or even the BAW user attributes (in case you created an additional custom synchronization) to remove out-of-office users from the team.

    The result of the TFS is a new group of users to which the task is assigned.
    It is important to understand that
    - the group is not updated when users in that group change status (come back to office or go on leave), because the TFS is not periodically re-executed
    - assignment of the next task instance will trigger the TFS code again. Its result can be again a new group or, in case the set of calculated members matches a group that was previously created, the task is assigned to that existing group
    - A TFS created groups will be deleted when the last task referring to it is deleted.

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    Jens Engelke
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  • 3.  RE: Possible people substitution solutions or ideas?

    Posted Mon November 09, 2020 02:47 AM
    Hi Jens,

    I see, thanks!
    The Outlook OOF status read works, so it is a good starting point.

    Thx,

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    ____________________
    Laszlo
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  • 4.  RE: Possible people substitution solutions or ideas?

    Posted Fri November 20, 2020 03:25 PM
    I've written this solution a number of times over the years.  For items that wind up assigned to a user there are a few questions we need to answer - 
    • When do we start re-assignment?
    • When do we stop re-assignment?
    • Who is it going to?
    • Should the original user reclaim when they are back?
    • How does the user extend their OOO?
    • How do they terminate if they are back early?
    But from a product perspective, where you need to make sure you don't cause problems for what can be very complex solutions, you quickly get into some items that give you "it depends" answers.  For example -
    • Is the designation of the person these should go to done universally or per process.
    • What if the designee was involved in the process earlier (think - can I approve my own expense report scenario)
    • How do we document what happened for audit purposes (e.g. why did Andrew approve this thing when it say Laszio is supposed to do it in our documentation and code)
    • Should I have the option to add my designee to teams?  (I don't ever like to assign to a person, you should assign to a team with 1 person in it instead).
    • If so, which teams?
    As you can see it can become quickly complex, which makes it difficult for the product team to create a simple "One size fits all" solution to this.  It gets even more complicated if HIPPA type rules have to be followed, or if you can only assign a task to a person with certain qualifications.

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    Andrew Paier
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