New Starter/Leaver Process – Part 3

In my previous posts in this series (New Starter/Leaver Process – Part 1 and New Starter/Leaver Process – Part 2) I described, diagrammatically, a new starter business process that could be implemented in Service Desk Express as shown below:

In the final part of this series I am going to finish it off with the business rules that tie everything together. Before I do so I should mention that I have made some changes to the Function GET_STD_CONFIGS detailed in the previous post. So if you downloaded this before please go ahead and download it again and run it against your Service Desk Express database.

The first business rule we need is to create the new starter ticket (incident) when a client is created:

CL01 – Client Insert Create New Starter Ticket

Conditions

when a Client

Create occurs with

Expression 1	Comparison Operator	Expression 2	Logical Operator
No Conditions

Actions

Action 1

Method	Module	Form
Create	Incident	Incident (base)

Field Name	Value
Client ID	{TR,Client ID}
Company ID	{TR,Company ID}
Group Name	HELPDESK
Subject ID	ZZNS
Status ID	OPEN
Description	New Starter

Not very exciting but it does the job. Now we need a business rule that is going to send an email to the new starter’s supervisor (a new foreign key in the Client module referencing the Client module called Seq.Supervisor) and create a new work order for the SYSTEM ADMINS to create an Active Directory and Exchange account.

HD01 – New Starter Ticket Stage 01

Conditions

when a Incident

Create occurs with

Expression 1	Comparison Operator	Expression 2	Logical Operator
{TR,Subject ID}	Equals	ZZNS	None

Actions

Action 1

Method	Module	Form
Create	Notifications	Notifications

Field Name	Value
Subject	Service Desk Notification: New Starter Approval Required
Body	{TEMPL,HD14}
Notification Module Descr	SMTP Email
Client ID	{DB,Clients,Supervisor Client ID,”Sequence” = {TR,Seq.Client}}

Action 2

Method	Module	Form
Create	Work Orders	Work Orders

Field Name	Value
Incident #	{TR,Incident #}
Client ID	{TR,Client ID}
Company ID	{TR,Company ID}
Group Name	SYSADMINS
Subject ID	ZZNSEX
Status ID	OPEN
Description	Please create a new Active Directory / Exchange account for this new starter. Once complete, please update the client’s email address by clicking the Faces icon near the Client Information at the top of this form and entering the email address created. Thank you.
Resolution	AD/Email Account Created and Client Successfully Updated.

Notification Business Rules Template HD14 referenced in the above business rule makes use of a two other templates created in my HTML Email Template post. Make sure you create the _HTML_HEAD and _HTML_FOOT templates otherwise this business rule wont work properly.

HD14 – New Starter Email To Supervisor

Template Name

HD14

Template Data

{TEMPL,_HTML_HEAD} <P>Dear {DB,Clients,Supervisor First Name,”Sequence” = {TR,Seq.Client}},</P> <P> A new starter request has been raised for {TR,First Name} {TR,Last Name}. As the supervisor of this new starter you are required to specify which equipment configuration they will require. Please click on one of the links below and then send the email generated. </P> <H2>Eqiupment Selection</H2> <TABLE> {MATH,(SELECT _SMDBA_.GET_STD_CONFIGS({TR,Incident #}))} </TABLE> <P> Thank you for your assistance with this service request. </P> {TEMPL,_HTML_FOOT}

That’s half of our business process complete. The email that is sent will automatically list all the Standard CI Assemblies available complete with hyperlinks such that when the supervisor clicks on their choice it will create an email configured in a way that we can pick up the inbound email and continue the business process. To pick up the inbound email from the supervisor we need a Mail Listen type business rule.

ML01 – New Starter Approval Received

Conditions

when a Mail Listen

Create occurs with

Expression 1	Comparison Operator	Expression 2	Logical Operator
{TR,Subject}	Contains	Service Desk Notification: New Starter Approval Given	None

Actions

Action 1

Method	Module	Form
Create	Work Orders	Work Orders

Field Name	Value
Incident #	{EXTRACT,^^,{TR,Subject}}
Client ID	{DB,Incident,Client ID,”Incident #” = {EXTRACT,^^,{TR,Subject}} }
Company ID	{DB,Incident,Company ID,”Incident #” = {EXTRACT,^^,{TR,Subject}} }
Group Name	DESKTOPS
Subject ID	ZZNSWS
Status ID	OPEN
Description	Please build a {DB,Standard CI Assembly,Description,”Name” = ‘{EXTRACT,[],{TR,Subject}}’} for the above user. Additional Comments: {TR,Message}

The above business rule simply creates the new workstation work order for our DESKTOPS team advising them of the choice our supervisor has made. The final business rule is the one that assigns the parent Service Request to the HR team for them to complete the new user induction. The trick here though is how do you know which work order is going to be completed first and how to you know when both work orders have been completed. The answer to the first is that you don’t (although you could take a good guess) and as such you need to allow for the fact that either of the work orders could be the last to be closed and should thus trigger this final business rule.

WO01 – New Starter WOs Completed

Conditions

when a Work Orders

Update occurs with

Expression 1	Comparison Operator	Expression 2	Logical Operator
{DB,Incident,Subject ID,”Incident #” = {TR,Seq.HD #}}	Equals	ZZNS	And
{MATH,(SELECT COUNT(*) FROM _SMDBA_._WORKORD_ WHERE STATUS = ‘O’ AND HDNUM = {TR,Seq.HD #})}	Equals	0	And
{MATH,(SELECT COUNT(*) FROM _SMDBA_._WORKORD_ WHERE HDNUM = {TR,Seq.HD #})}	Equals	2	None

Actions

Action 1

Method	Module	Form
Update	Incident	Incident (base)

Field Name	Value
Incident #	{TR,Seq.HD #}
Group Name	HR
Description	Please provide a new user induction for the above user.

So essentially what we are doing here is checking that the parent Incident / Service Request is a New Starter one and that the total number of linked Work Orders is 2 and the total number of open linked Work Orders is 0 i.e. they have all been closed.

Summary

Whilst this business process could have been a lot more complicated (I once implemented one with 6 parallel work orders etc.) this series of posts have shown how it is possible to chain business rules together to deliver a real business process. Hope this helps. As always, any feedback, positive or negative is always welcome. Thanks for reading.

New Starter/Leaver Process – Part 2

In my previous post (New Starter/Leaver Process – Part 1) I described, diagrammatically, a new starter business process that could be implemented in Service Desk Express as shown below:

In this post we are going to lay the foundations to build this process (by populating some necessary data) and then in the final post in the series we will complete the business rules.

Categories/Support Subjects

We need to add a couple of Categories /Support Subjects as shown below:

Subject ID	Description	Parent Subject ID
ZZ	zzBusinessRules
ZZNS	New Starter Process	ZZ
ZZNSEX	AD/Exchange Account Request	ZZNS
ZZNSWS	Workstation Request	ZZNS

Now obviously it goes without saying that you don’t have to have the same categories as me. The reason I name Business Rules as zzBusinessRules is to shove them down the bottom of the Category Tree out of the way.

Groups

In my example I am going to have a centralised System Admin Group (SYSADMINS), Desktop Team (DESKTOPS), and HR Team (HR) who will do my induction process. Again, if you are following this you can call your groups whatever you want

CI Types/Inventory Catalogue Items

Whenever I write these posts I am always keen to make the example something that has a reasonable degree of complexity about it. Many technical examples are based around the equivalent of the Hello World application, and from bitter experience this CAN be more frustrating than useful. So in my example here, I am going to assume that we are using the Asset Management modules as well. So we’ll need the following CITypes/Inventory Catalogue Items:

Part #	Description
STDWS01	Standard Workstation
STDLT01	Standard Laptop
STDMB01	Standard Mobile Phone
STDBU01	Standard Operating System/Applications Build
STD3G01	Standard 3G Card

Standard Configurations

We are then going to create two standard configurations as shown below:

Name	Description
STDST	Standard Static Configuration
Consisting of…
STDWS01	Standard Workstation
STDBU01	Standard Operating System/Applications Build

and

Name	Description
STDMB	Standard Mobile Configuration
Consisting of…
STDLT01	Standard Laptop
STDMB01	Standard Mobile Phone
STDBU01	Standard Operating System/Applications Build
STD3G01	Standard 3G Card

Standard Configurations User Defined Function

As anyone will tell you, when, as a developer, you hardcode stuff you invariably come to regret it (unless you have already left the organisation that is). I want to be able to send my supervisors a dynamic list of Standard Configurations that he/she can select from such that if that business decides at a later date to have a Non-Standard Mobile Configuration we can cope with it without the need for any code changes.
Alas, out of the box Service Desk Express can’t send a list of anything to anyone. This is where we need a little SQL help in the form of a User-Defined Function (UDF). Below is a link to a function I want to use to send out part of my email which can either be run yourself against the SDE database or given to your SQL DBA to run against the SDE database:

Function GET_STD_CONFIGS

If you haven’t used user-defined functions in SDE then you might find this post helpful.

Summary

So that is all the preparation work done. Now all we have to do is build our business rules to use all this stuff and that is what I will document in the third and final post in this series.

Change Management Business Process

They always say,

“…a picture paints a thousand words…”

and, whilst generally not considered works of art, I find swim lane diagrams or cross-functional flowcharts (as they are called in Microsoft Visio) are a really superb way of explaining who does what when.

So, in the spirit of the above, whilst bored this evening (sat in a hotel room on my M2576 Implementing and Administering Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) 6.0 training course), I thought I would put together an example business process diagram for Change Management:

Change Management - Creation, categorisation and assessment

Change Management - Approval, release, and closure

I have saved it as both a Microsoft Visio 2003/2007 and Microsoft Visio 2002 diagram such that it might be useful to you as a starting point for your own Change Management process diagrams:

Microsoft Visio 2003/2007 Download
Microsoft Visio 2002 Download

As always, comments/feedback (positive or negative) is always welcome.