Adding Activities to In Progress Parallel Activity

Nick_Flint

Has anyone made a change to enable the adding of activities to a parallel activity after it is in progress?

I suspect that SCSM is designed to not allow the adding of activities to a parallel activity that is in progress and that the Cireson Portal add activity feature is just following that. I also suspect this has to do with the mechanism for updating the new activity status. Namely, when a parallel activity status is changed to In Progress the activities within it are updated to also be in progress. If you were to add an activity after that initial updating of status the new activity would likely sit as New and never go to In Progress because the trigger (PA status change) doesn't occur again.

One of the advantages to using the Cireson portal is that we can overcome 'flaws' in the design of SCSM. Why not allow an activity to be added to an in progress parallel activity and simply set it's status to In Progress at the time of creation?

Adam_Dzyacky

Well I can tell you this @Nick_Flint - you are ridiculously close as to what happens in this scenario. If you were to add an Activity to an In Progress PA, that Activity will actually move from New -> Pending.

But to your point, setting the Activity to In Progress at create would overcome this and (from my limited testing) Notify Analyst should respect this as well and send out an email.

That said. I suppose the open question here to you/onlookers - is there a reason why setting it to In Progress out of the gate is not desirable? For example:

• Is there a case where you want to control the Status on create?
• Would there be a reason where the out of box behavior of Pending is desirable and then controlled through some kind of subsequent automation?

Nick_Flint

I don't see a need for us for either of those scenarios; however, if a status selector was included we could probably just hide it if not needed.