To and fro,
Stop and go,
That's what makes the world go round
In and out,
Thin and stout,
That's what makes the world go round
That is the chorus from a song sung by Merlin in one of my favorite animated films the Sword in the Stone. (Not familiar watch it here)
It’s one of those refrains that can get stuck in my head, and I’ll hum it all day long (an earworm I think is what some would call it – fun fact 98% of Western population has experienced these).
Well, that happened to me this week when one of my colleagues taught me something new about our ServiceNow Process Mining solution and when I learn something new, I feel compelled to pass it along – because that’s what makes the world go round.
Merlin’s wisdom captures the essence of what drives organizations: business processes. Whether processes run smoothly or hit snags, understanding their flow is crucial to improvement.
Image generated by ChatGPT
What Process Mining gives us is visibility into the “To and Fro” and the “Stop and Go” of our business processes so we can identify opportunities to improve. Every process has situations where work isn’t conforming to the designed path or is getting stuck at a certain step or with a certain team, being able to identify those situations is the first step to improvement.
There are many ways the Process Mining Workspace helps to surface these opportunities the one I want to focus on with this post is the Records To and Records From portion of the solution.
Image representing a Process Mining map with Assignment Group as the selected Activity definition.
When you click on any Activity node (an Activity node represents a step in the process. Could be state or assignment group change) on a process map you get presented with a pop up that provides you a ton of detailed information about that particular step in the process.
- Volume of unique pieces of work (incidents, cases, requests, etc.) that passed through that step (state, assignment group, etc.) of the process
- The total number of occurrences (meaning work that may have touched the step more than once)
- The Max Repetitions (maximum number of times an individual piece of work touched that step)
- A histogram which gives you a distribution of those repeat occurrences and allows you to filter the process map based on those different buckets if you want to dig into anyone of those areas.
- Option to drill down into the detailed records
- Requestor intent which exposes some of the actionable information that lives in the unstructured data like short descriptions and descriptions,
- Root cause analysis to see some leading influencers driving work to this step
- Option to filter the process map to isolate only the records that pass through that specific step
Sample of pop-up when clicking on an Activity on the map
In addition to all of that you have the option to see where the work that is touching this step is coming From and where the work is going to next.
For example, we can see in the screenshot below that 94% of the work that the CX Support Service Desk Level 1 team is doing is being assigned to them immediately at the beginning of the process. 204 or 3% of the work is being transferred to them from the CX Support -Americas team and on average it is taking that team 17 hours and 16 minutes to make that transfer. There are another 63 records or 1% that is coming from CX Support – EMEA and so on.
Example process map looking at how work is moving from Assignment Group to Assignment Group
In each of these scenarios we may want to dig in and understand more about the work that is being transferred and see if there are routing rules that can be adjusted to help get this work to correct team the first time.
On the flip side we may want to use the Records to list to get a better understanding of where certain teams are sending work to and how long are they holding on to that work before they decide to pass it along. In the screenshot below we can see that this CX Support Service Desk Level 1 group is only actually closing out (sending to Process End) 50% of the work that hits their group. The are sending 27% to CX Support – Americas and 7% to CX Support – EMEA and 7% to CX Support – APAC.
Example process map looking at how work is moving from Assignment Group to Assignment Group
That may be how the process is designed but maybe it’s not. In either case you now have visibility into this data to help understand whether the routing rules you’ve put in place are working or not.
In the above examples we were looking at the volume and velocity of work moving between different teams, but we use the same capability to understand how well work is moving through the different steps or states of a process and is that work conforming to the process we designed. The screenshot below highlights that 62% of the incidents we have moving through this process are going from In Progress directly to Resolved and it is on average taking 2 days and 10 hours for that state change to happen. 34% of the incidents are going from In Progress to Awaiting Caller. Both of those would be expected. But what about those 728 or 9% that are going directly from In Progress to Closed. That is likely not how the process was designed to flow you might want to focus in why and how that is happening.
Example process map looking at how work is moving from State to State and using the Records To table view
As you can see the Records from and Records to section can be very useful as you do your process analysis.
Let’s say you’re interested in metrics other than Unique Occurrences and Avg Duration.
You can use the Global Metrics panel on the right-hand side of the Analyst Workbench to swap in new metrics.
Example of the Global Metrics panel which is accessed on the right hand side of the Analyst Workbench
The table in the pop-up node will be sorted in descending order by the values of the Primary Metric you choose. (this was the thing I learned this week).
We are going to take this one step further. This Records to and Records from capability is not just available in the Process Mining Analyst Workbench.
It’s also available when you embed Process Mining process maps as visualizations to your Platform Analytics dashboards. If you weren’t aware, you could do that check out this Process Mining Academy session.
Sample Platform Analytics dashboard with two Process Mining process map visualizations added
Once a process map visualization is added to a dashboard if you drilldown on any of the nodes on the map you will get the Records to and Records from view of that map centered on the node you clicked on. In the example below we clicked on the IT Support Services group.
Example of the view when drilling in to a node on a process map visualization
Now we can see all the incoming and outgoing work for this group.
We could then isolate it to just the work being transferred in.
Example process map visualization that has been isolated ot just the incoming work
And then isolate or get to the detailed records for high volume or problem areas.
As I mentioned earlier, this Records To and Records From capability is just one of the many ways Process Mining helps you better understand how work is moving through your organizations giving you visibility into potential opportunities to reduce cycle times and increase productivity.
I’ll let Merlin close this post out.
To and fro
Stop and go
That's what makes the world go round
It's up to you how far you go
If you don't try, you'll never know
And so my lad as I've explained
Nothing ventured, nothing gained
If you haven’t already taken the time to look at ServiceNow Process Mining here are some ways to learn a little more.
- Guide to getting started with Process Mining
- What workflows (ITSM, CSM, HR, etc) is Process Mining available for?
- How to create your first Process Mining project (Washington DC experience)
- Planning your ServiceNow Process Mining program
- How to use Process Mining to identify process improvement opportunities
- Process Mining FAQ
- Process Mining Academy
- Am I ready for Process Mining?
- Benefits of running Process Mining in a production environment
- Why behind the KPI: How Process Mining complements Performance Analytics
- Process Mining for external process data
- Automated Findings
