States and Dates - interactions and rules for Engagements/Activities

[BerndL]

Hi - first time poster, so please be gentle 😉 

We are in the middle of an Audit Management implementation. I've searched far and wide for documentation on the following, but was unable to find anything useful. Hopefully somebody in the community point me in the right direction?

• Engagement states
  I am aware of what the different states are for, as per Manage engagements (servicenow.com), but what is not clear is (other than from running into constraints via trial and error)
  • what can/cannot be done in any given state,
  • where one can move from a given state (only forward to the next one, or to others),
  • what to do when a mistake is made for example in scoping, and something needs adjusting, but we moved to fieldwork already.
• Dates between Engagements and Activities influence each other (e.g. Engagement Actual Start date gets populated with date/time the first activity moves on from 'Open' state (apparently)
  • What other such dependencies/interactions exist? We find that these automatisms can get in the way of planning since one can move activity states even though the Engagement is still in 'Validate', but because an activity may now already be beyond 'open', no others can be entered starting before that date/time the first activity has commenced, because the Engagement actual start date is tied to that date/time.

If anybody has found any reference documentation or can share their experience with this that would be great, thank you!