Kanban Board of Clarity for Service Management ?

[Dimitris Tranoudis]

 Kanban Board for Service Management in Clarity

A prospect customer is interested in leveraging Clarity’s Kanban Board to manage Service Management activities by handling incoming tickets and requests as tasks. To my understanding, to support this use case, the following capabilities are required:

• 1. Task Submission by Users
  • Any user within the organization must be able to submit a new task, effectively creating a service request.

• 2. Access for Service Delivery Team
  • Service Delivery Team members must be able to:
  ▪ View all tasks (tickets) assigned to them
  ▪ Update task status and related details

• 3. Ongoing Visibility for Requestors
  • The original requestor must retain access to:
  ▪ View the current status of the submitted own task,
  ▪ Review or participate in task-related discussions and updates

• 4. Controlled Visibility
  • Tasks (tickets) must be visible only to:
  ▪ The originating requestor
  ▪ The assigned Service Delivery Team member
  • Visibility must be restricted from unrelated users or teams to ensure confidentiality and focus

Is this feasible?

Is there a way to implement especially 1 & 4?

Thanks for any feedback, thoughts, will be appreciated.

[Suman Pramanik]

The options I can think of is using the board view of the list page os objects , in you care I can think of using Task Workspace along with custom objects in combination to achieve what you are looking for 

[Dimitris Tranoudis]

Thanks Suman.

It's a good hint. I will give it a try.

[Marcel Wagner]

We use Clarity to handle "service requests" and "changes" via the idea object. Benefits:

• Creating and editing only requires a Viewer-License (as long as no creating/editing of Risks, Change Requests, Status Reports or Staffing is required). 
• Access/Edit rights via "Originating Requestor" and "Manager" attributes (as far as I remember)
• Use of Templates
• Time entries possible

The process is mainly processed via the "old" workflow engine (i.e. "Submit" checkbox, Action Items for initial Approvals, work distribution, ...), but the actual execution part is done via the board view in some teams. If a ticket reaches the "Complete/Implementation done" status, the workflow picks this up, and sends an "user accpetance test" action item to the originating requestor.

"+ABC+" columns are processed via the workflow, within the other columns, tickets are pushed around on the board by the users:

 

Kind regards

Marcel

[Dimitris Tranoudis]

Thanks Marcel. Great approach. Also connecting with the licensing aspect and the auto rights. I appreciate.
Do you feel that this approach could be serving multiple departments co-existing in the same idea space? Isolated maybe through a "Department" attribute set by the creator?

[Marcel Wagner]

Automatically distribute access rights for single investments to users or groups was always kind of weak with Clarity. It got a little better with one of the last releases: Blueprint -> Business Rules, but its still quite restricted (see Screenshot below).

So, to seperate access between departments, I only can imagine an (additional) OBS, with access to investments tied to a OBS-"department" via defined access groups (lot of admistrative work) or via a customizing / add on. To distribute access rights based on very individual rules, we currently use a customizing from contec-x named "Dynamic Rights" (Clarity PPM software - faster implementation, less efforts and using it better - with us! -> need to scroll down a bit), which is a Job checking a XML-file and we plan to switch to a combination of the already mentioned Business Rules and "itdesign Access" (Automatic Assignment of Rights in Clarity).

[Luis Palacios]

Only concern with using ideas or any other type of investment, is they have a significant paper trail and volume in investments can surface certain issues. Same concern around high volume applies to high number of instance rights. You can always use custom objects if needed to decrease some of this concerns. Will this requests be synched to a ticketing system?

[Dimitris Tranoudis]

Thanks, Luis Palacios  — very insightful.
We won’t be syncing with a ticketing system; all service requests will be managed within Clarity.

Could you clarify what issues you’ve seen with the “paper trail” in investment or ideas objects?

• Performance?

• Admin overhead?

Also, why are custom objects better here?

• And can the requestor still view their own ticket if it’s handled via a custom object?

Appreciate your input.

[Luis Palacios]

Hi Dimitris, 

Custom Investments are considered investments and depend on the investment meta object, so any customizations are to be considered. In parallel, they have investment specific modules like financial plans, status reports, etc that don't sound like being required for use this case.

So in my opinion, its an overkill not providing benefits to the use case but can lead to potential risks.

As for the custom object, yes when an instance is created the creator automatically gets instance rights. 

Altogether, we are focusing this conversation on certain items but implementing a ticketing system in Clarity requires design and considerations depending on the requirements of your user community.