One often overlooked piece of magic in building catalog requests are flow stages.
Why? - These aid in the requestor user experience by keeping users informed on the stage of their request.
Requested Item stages as you may be aware are shown in a few area’s against the requested item. Far too often I see where these are not used, incorrectly user or not used effectively.
Flow stages from requested items
Flow stages from employee center
As with online shopping knowing the status of your request/order is useful and helps deflect some questions into the service desk. Setting this up is extremely easy and can be unique based on the flow executing against your catalog item. I said per flow intentionally meaning any catalog item using a shared flow (Catalog builder) should have generic flow stages (ex. Requested, Pending Approval, Approved, Fulfillment, Closed Complete) that is appropriate to multiple items. This also provides a good use case to create a separate flow for catalog item types around service, software or hardware.
How to setup and use flow stages
- Within your flow click on the top right (…) and select Flow stages
- Conveniently you can pull from a template so we can avoid manually recreating each time. This also ensure consistency. If you wish choose a template and click on Add Stages
- At this point you will likely need to reorder the stages and configure slightly.
- Recommendations
- For some stages such as Rejected or Request Cancelled unselect Always Show if the requested item is in this state it will show this stages otherwise it will not be shown.
- Add duration to help the user understand the expected time frame of some stages.
- At most create one stage per flow action. This could include an approval, task or integration. For large flows group items under a stage. Consider when you purchase something online, there are steps such as order picking and packaging that I am not aware of and provide no value to me.
- Recommendations
- Once this is complete build your flow as per normal and add flow stages on the far-right side of each action.
- Complete your catalog item and test. You will notice that the fulfillment process drives the flow stage and keeps the user informed. Below you will see my “Detoxification task” is linked to the “Detoxification” flow stage which the requestor can easily follow.
- Also notice that some stages are not show (Request cancelled and Rejected). These will display if that stage is reached.
One other note, by using flow stages we can use the stage "Closed Complete" to close the Requested item, and Request. By doing so this updates the stage as well as the state to Completed.
Happy building!
