This post is part of the Process Mining Use Case Series where we’ll focus on different techniques to identify process inefficiencies, non-conformant activities, and improvement opportunities.
Most workflows provide the opportunity for an employee, customer, citizen, business partner to reopen a piece of work after it has been closed if they are not satisfied with the response or if there is further action required.
Regardless of the reason why the piece of work is reopened this is probably not the optimal experience for the given stakeholder which will impact our satisfaction metrics, and the fact that we didn’t get it right the first time will also have a productivity impact.
All of this reopened work is valuable feedback and should be used to identify coaching opportunities, process improvements, automation ideas or content quality updates – whether that be to our standard operating procedures, run books, or knowledge articles.
Process Mining can be used to help us analyze reopened work to isolate these opportunities. This approach can be applied to any workflow(Incident, HR Case, Customer Service Case, etc) and does not require any additional/special configuration beyond the out of the box content packs offered with a given workflow.
How to do the analysis
Open your project to the Improvement Opportunities section and filter for 'Rework' (shown below).
It reveals that Rework on resolved state has an average of 1 week and 19 years of total inefficiency trapped which if improved on will unravel cost and time benefits. Clicking on it, shows the opportunity details.
'Highlights' show AI based summary of the reopened work analysis hinting at process variations caused by reopened work and implies two or more reassignments between groups.
From the 'Investigate' feature, you can initiate RCA (root cause analysis) that reveals the category of tickets, assignment groups and channels of tickets mainly responsible for reopened work.
Clustering groups the key words on the 'short description' field of the tickets that were reopened to prompt you with topics for knowledge enhancement, team coaching and automation ideas.
'Show records' will take you straight to the full list of reopened tickets from where you can launch 'interactive analysis' to view the charts of assignment groups or assignees who you could coach and engage to improve.
'Analyze in analyst workvench' will take you to the clickable process map where upon clicking the 'Resolved to In Progress' arc you will notice that tickets were repeatedly reopened. Breakdown panel will show you the assignment groups, categories, resolution codes and channels to dissect the data further to devise next steps on your path to improvement.
Layering the Process Map by 'assignment group' view will show you the multi-hopping of tickets between groups and the variant steps will further reveal opportunities for process improvement.
Capture your improvement ideas by documenting them all in CIM (continual improvement management) right from Process Mining workbench and assign tasks to team members who will act on them for regular process monitoring and efficiency gains.
Before you embark on reopened work analysis, make sure your Process Configuration is setup correctly, and that you have mined your first project successfully. Follow the links below to learn how to master these steps.
Learning Resources:
Guide to getting started with ServiceNow Process Mining
Courses on ServiceNow University - Fundamentals & Advanced
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