So often with process mining we want to understand how and why things are moving from one value to another, and we usually REALLY care about what those values are. There are many instances however, that we don't really care what something is changing to. What I really care about is that it is changing at all...
In today's post and video I'm going to show you how we use Grouped Activities to identify any time a specific field changes. I may not necessarily care what it is changing into but the fact that it is changing is enough of a red flag for me to look into!
Fields like configuration items, categories, or even subcategories DRIVE a lot of our automation and therefore our processes. If we didn't get it right the first time it could be causing some headaches!
Here is a quick video on how to achieve this with many examples or follow along below:
How to do the analysis
This approach can be applied to any workflow (Incident, HR Case, Customer Service Case, etc) and does not require any additional/special Process Mining configuration beyond the out of the box content packs offered with a given workflow.
Today we'll be starting in our Process Mine setup:
You can see in the screenshot I have a NORMAL activity of "State". This means when I mine I will see all the different States as the move and change throughout the Process.
But what if I wanted to see when/where a CI was changing? Obviously I don't want to clutter my process map with potentially millions of different CI's showing up.
Well let's just create a grouped Activity:
Just 3 easy steps from here...:
I added another one just for fun!
THAT IS IT. Seriously that is it. From here all we need to do is mine the project et voila! We should be able to see all our grouped activities included in the map with everything else:
Now that the nodes are on the map I can start to Investigate and see what States are leading to a CI change using the Records To and Records From.
I can even start to build transition filters to identify all the incidents that are changing their Assigned To or CI more than once, twice, or even 10 times (do not underestimate how many times these supposedly static fields can change, we have seen HUNDREDS!)
This was just a few examples of how you can use grouped activities to really help you tell the actual story of what's going on. Good luck!
Thanks for reading and as always,
If you are looking for more in-depth training you can use the Process Mining Academy library of content
You can find other Process Mining use cases here
BelalA
