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Wait Activity - An activity that sits in no-ones queue whilst waiting for the proper time to start

We know with uses it goes one of two ways. They ask for something that needs doing in the next 5 minutes, or they ask you to do something that can't be done for weeks or even months.

For example, we get an SR for a user for a leaving employee. We have a full list of activities that needs doing, but none of it can be done until they have actually left. This could be weeks in advance. No-one in IT wants a SR or the first MA sat in their queue for weeks, having to periodically check it for if they can finally action it or not.

Introducing my idea: Wait Activity



This activity can be place at the start of the activities, with the Wait Until date entered manually or even mapped from a Request Offering. This activity is not assigned to any individual or group so nobody sees it in their queue. A workflow will run each day just after midnight, and once the date is reached, the activity will be completed, kicking the first proper activity into In Progress and the process can begin.

Please up-vote if you think this would be useful to your organisations and teams.

Geoff
14
14 votes

Completed · Last Updated

Delay Activity is available at https://softwaredownloads.cireson.com

Comments

  • Jeff_LangJeff_Lang Customer Ninja IT Monkey ✭✭✭✭
    this would definitely be good out of the box, to get around having to wait for things ourselves we had to implement a similar idea, we have a back end workflow checking MA's that have "Time Delay Activity XXXXX" in the title, where the XXXXX is set to the number of minutes that the activity waits then gets set to completed by the back end workflow.

    having this as it's own activity type would make it a lot easier, also having options to wait until a set date/time or wait a set number of minutes/hours/days etc

  • Adam_DzyackyAdam_Dzyacky Product Owner Contributor Monkey ✭✭✭✭✭
    Historically we've left this to long running SCO/SMA jobs, but I am very open to this.
  • Geoff_RossGeoff_Ross Cireson Consultant O.G.
    @Adam_Dzyacky
    Yes, and probably not an issue for a few hours but a Runbook running for several weeks is likely to have issues on some occasions. This method would just have a process that runs daily looking for WAs that have hit the required date.
    Thanks for the Up-Vote. Don't forget to like and subscribe :)
  • Tom_HendricksTom_Hendricks Customer Super IT Monkey ✭✭✭✭✭
    I have been approaching this very differently.  However, I really like this for its simplicity.

    I have been working on work item recurrence (similar to Outlook appointment recurrence) and aside from its other purposes, I was planning to utilize it to create a follow-up ticket set in the future, related to the current one.  I like having this all in the same ticket better, though.
  • Geoff_RossGeoff_Ross Cireson Consultant O.G.
    Thanks Tom.
  • Jonathan_BolesJonathan_Boles Customer Ninja IT Monkey ✭✭✭✭
    This seems like a really slick solution for these types of situations. We just had a similar request come from one of our operational support teams last week where they have to deal with certain actions sometimes 6, 12 or ever 24 months out. 
  • Eric_KrasnerEric_Krasner Customer Advanced IT Monkey ✭✭✭
    As a workaround for this situation, we have created a new workitem (Postpone Activity). You set the scheduled end date/time and then have an Orchestrator Runbook that runs once an hour looking for Postpone Activities where the ScheduledEndDate is in the past. If it is, the runbook sets the postpone activity to completed.
  • Kenneth_AndersenKenneth_Andersen Customer IT Monkey ✭

    We have an service request offering with a Runbook activity. It assign a license for the user to be used for 1-5 days.

    The template for the RO have 2 Runbooks activities

    the first one for the assigning process of the license and second one to remove the license again.

    Then the first Runbook runs it set the “schedule start date” on the second Runbook. And set the SR to status “Hold”

    every midnight there is a monitor checking for overdue “schedule start date” , and set the SR status to “In progress” again.


    Bonus info

    We also have an internal field (dropdown), there the SR is set for “awaiting RBA”. This is handy then no one need to see the Servive Request in there standard views, by excluded the cases with this value.

    we are using the same field, then awaiting manager approval .

  • Taras_KirillovTaras_Kirillov Member IT Monkey ✭

    Hi! Could you please tell me more ditails about back end workflow process described in your post? Im trying to do postpone activities in SR and I dont know how to do it ...(

  • Justin_WorkmanJustin_Workman Cireson Support Super IT Monkey ✭✭✭✭✭

    Good news @Taras_Kirillov! A new Delay Activity just came out this week!

    https://kb.cireson.com/article/install-delay-activity/2623


    You can obtain Delay Activity from our downloads page at https://softwaredownloads.cireson.com.

  • Jeff_LangJeff_Lang Customer Ninja IT Monkey ✭✭✭✭

    just a FYI for those grabbing the Delay Activity, the 2016 version appears to require 2016 UR10 to be installed going off the required management pack numbers it wants

  • Chris_Chekaluk1Chris_Chekaluk1 Customer Advanced IT Monkey ✭✭✭

    What is the scheduled frequency of the workflow? The community posting mentions a daily workflow running after midnight. However, since the new Activity can delay on the order of minutes, my assumption is that it'll run more frequently than once/day. Also, we haven't installed this yet, but is there a SCSM setting that give the admin the ability to adjust the frequency as appropriate for a given environment?

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