CAB Workbench Meeting - Agenda Management

[Eric Jones]

Hello Community!

We are in the process of implementing CAB Workbench for our organization. As part of our testing and training we are seeing an issue with the agenda auto-populating. Our issue is a bit different than others that I have seen question posted about.

We have created our CAB Definition and the Agenda Management section and refreshed our CAB Meetings. To validate that I have data that should be captured I have created a report that returns data for my specified criteria, however, the CAB Meeting agenda does not populate with the data from the report when we use Refresh Agenda Items on the CAB Meeting. I can manually add a Change request to the agenda which will sometimes get the data that I expected to auto-populate to appear, but not always.

This is our last hurdle to get ready for implementation and use of the functionality. We can manually create the agenda, but that is not a feasible solution to a tool that is supposed to help with automating the CAB meeting.

Has anyone had similar issues with the Agenda Management in CAB Workbench?

[Eric Jones]

Thanks for the quick reply Tony. Much appreciated sir!

In my original post, we had set our repeat_until for a year out and were having issues with the Refresh CAB Agenda functioning properly. When I adjusted repeat_until to be the date after the next CAB meeting, it worked properly. Except for not creating additional meeting occurrences. 

It almost seems like either way I have an issue but can't seem to find a middle ground:

1. If I use repeat_until at a future date, meeting occurrences are created as expected, however, the Refresh CAB Agenda script doesn't function as expected.
2. If I use repeat_until at a date immediately after my next CAB meeting, the Refresh CAB Agenda script functions as expected, however, my occurrences end at the date defined in repeat_until.

Is there possibly a documented best practice for using the CAB Workbench functionality for daily meetings?

Thank you again for the quick response!

[Tony Chatfield1]

Hi, I regardless of the number of CAB meetings created in advance, refresh agenda would need to be run manually each week.
Perhaps you can share some more specific details?

[Eric Jones]

Hi there,

Yes, that is correct we will have to refresh the agenda daily. However, when we initially created our definition, we used a date of a year out for the repeat_until. When doing so, the refresh agenda script didn't seem to be working and we could only manually create our agenda.

When we adjusted our repeat_until date to the date immediately after our CAB meeting the script functioned as expected. 

Scenario:
We are meeting daily to discuss Change requests for a specific set of teams. We want to adopt CAB Workbench to automate this meeting (and several more throughout our enterprise). 

Original Schedule Entry Details:

• Repeats "Every Weekday (Mon-Fri)"
• Repeat until "07/29/2021"

When using this logic, the Refresh Agenda Items link would not function even though our query in Agenda Management should have returned change requests (validated by having a Report created with the same criteria to ensure data was present). We could manually add agenda items but that defeats the purpose of automation. 

Hopefully that provides more detail. 

Thank you again, I appreciate your assistance.
Eric

[Eric Jones · Accepted solution]

I believe that we have solved this issue. 

Per Tony's comment above:
This can cause confusion, and you might want to check the cab agenda items to see if your change_requests are already related to CAB meetings (for the same definition) with a state of pending or in-progress.

In our initial usage of CAB Workbench in our Test instance we found that Refresh Agenda Items link appeared to not be functioning properly.

Through trial and error and understanding of Tony's comment, we learned that when Change requests were added to a CAB Agenda using the Refresh Agenda Items link there is a record created on the meeting table. If during your meeting you do not address the agenda item it remains in a pending state on the meeting table. Therefore, the Refresh Agenda Items link does not recognize it as being completed and ignores it when populating the next meeting occurrence agenda. 

By ensuring that all agenda items are completed in each meeting, the original behavior reported in this thread is not encountered. 

Thank you.