Overview
Playbooks were released several releases ago to help agents deal with tickets faster. They were available in the "CSM Configurable Workspace", but since the "Service Operations Workspace" was release more and more customers asked about embedding playbooks there to deal with their Incidents in a much better way.
The "Service Operations Workspace" comes with a "Playbook" tab which is hidden OOB unless the ticket (incident, problem, requested item,...) matches one of the playbooks available. In that case the playbook tab will be shown along with the right playbook for it.
For any other workspace, this tab can be added by creating a new page and using the OOB layout for "Playbooks", although that is not the purpose of this article.
Process Automation Designer
The first thing we need to do to create playbooks for any IT Ticket, in this case Incidents, we need to go to "Process Automation Designer" under "Process Automation".
For this case, I created a new process, whose trigger is the "Incident Table" and the condition is "Short description contains password reset". This process will contain three stages, "Active Directory", "Communications" and "Resolution".
Then each stage will have 1 or 2 activities. In order to add a new activity, we need to click on the "+" icon and then select the right one. In our example, I used "Instruction", "Show Knowledge Article", the interactive version of "Send Email" and the non-interactive version of "Automated Update Record" respectively.
If we go to the "Board view" instead of the "Diagram view" this is how it will look like:
The activities are easy to be populated, let's see the case of the "Send Email", where the "Automation" tab allows us to specify the content of the email:
The one about showing a knowledge article allows us to select the article to be shown:
Using playbooks on other ITSM tables OOB
Thanks to @Matt Turner1 for highlighting that if you need to make playbooks available on other ITSM tables all you have to do is adding a "true/false" property set to "true" on the "Service Operations Workspace Core" application called "sn_sow.playbook.tables.<TableName>".
For instance, if you want to make this available for Requested Items it should be : "sn_sow.playbook.tables.sc_req_item". Below you can see how it is and the result:
Result
This is how it looks like in a real Incident. Once the first stage is displayed, the other remain locked:
When we complete the stages above, the ones below become editable.
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