How to handle Activities correctly?

Silas_Sulser

Hi guys

We've started using Change Management with activities.
One question: if you have some activities which are not in a parallel activity, how do you close all these activities?
Every time you close one, you have to click on "apply" wait for 30-60 seconds, that you can close the next activity..
Is that the normal way?

example:


Thanks and best regards

Adam_Dzyacky

Yes.

This is due to the minor lag time between the action in the portal, replicating back into core SCSM, core SCSM realizing the next activity has to move to In-Progress, then the Cireson Cache Builder syncing this update back before finally you see the update in the portal.

Roland_Kind

Yes, as far as I know,  this is the normal behavior - a possible solution is to create a runbook with orchestrator and close the activities with an apropriate workflow.

Depending on your needs - you can also skip activities.

Adam_Dzyacky

Yes.

This is due to the minor lag time between the action in the portal, replicating back into core SCSM, core SCSM realizing the next activity has to move to In-Progress, then the Cireson Cache Builder syncing this update back before finally you see the update in the portal.

Roland_Kind

Yes, as far as I know,  this is the normal behavior - a possible solution is to create a runbook with orchestrator and close the activities with an apropriate workflow.

Depending on your needs - you can also skip activities.

Brian_Wiest

The biggest part of SCSM as a global entity is to remember that Every workflow runs as a batch process.
If you review the Management packs each workflow will include two rows

<PollingIntervalInSeconds>60</PollingIntervalInSeconds>

<BatchSize>100</BatchSize>
This means that only every 60sec will the workflow rule run. And when it runs it only will process 100. So if you have 110 changes that match the rule the remaining 10 wait an additional 60sec. 
So when you mark an activity completed the workflow will pick it up within 60sec and update the next item to in progress. 
Then on top of that is Cireson Cache builder. It has a entry in the config <cacheCommand name="WorkItems" threadName="WORK" refreshInterval="1" batchSize="500" />
So here again you are updating every 60sec. 

So its truly about how your environment is "working" , as long as your are not superseding the batch sizes then you can expect on average a minute for workflows to progress a work item.

How I handle this is pushing on the staff to mark things off as they complete them. The tasks getting assigned are more then 1 minute user assignments. This allows for workflow time to run. 
If the activities are quick in nature that can be completed in less than 1 minute, I work with the process owner to design the activities to either having one activity with the tasks or contain them in a parallelif they must have them drawn out. 
HTH