Need Advice or Suggestions for Portal Widget Data!

[saint]

Hi Experts,

I’m looking for some guidance or best practices around enhancing the ESS portal experience for end users.

Currently, when users submit requests through the portal, they can only see the status of their request (e.g., "Pending Approval"). Some of our workflows include approval steps, and occasionally these approvals are pending for extended periods.

As per ITIL process, we do not want to expose who the request is currently assigned to or waiting on. However, I’d like to provide users with more meaningful information than just the status, something that gives them a sense of progress or what stage their request is in.

Has anyone dealt with a similar scenario?

• How did you improve transparency without compromising process integrity?
• Have you used custom portal widgets, UI policies, or data visualizations to show progress?
• Any examples or suggestions for what can be shown under My Requests > Requested Item?

Any ideas, examples, or even design suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks in advance for your help!

[Mark Manders]

It really is depending on what you can show. Because a request that is awaiting approval is just awaiting approval. What decides that duration? Is it just something that takes longer because the approvers only check their approvals once a month, or is it because of the process and the multiple approvals? 
You could just add that as a general text on certain items (it will show that it takes longer because of the process). But adding things like 'awaiting xyz' approval and 'awaiting abc' approval, doesn't say anything to the end user. They just have a request and if it takes 20 approvals, they just have to wait and the request is not in any other (sub)state. 
If you have some kind of guidance available, you could show it, but I don't know your process, so I don't know exactly what you can show.

One thing that does come to mind is the 'stages' field. If your flows are specific enough to show stages like 'Manager approval: 1st step of 4', 'Budget approval, 2nd step of 4', etc., you could show the stages, but that still doesn't tell you anything about how long it will take.