Using RITM vs Catalog Tasks

[JimmieOdelius]

Hi.

I'm wondering how people are "supposed" to work with catalog items.

• The request itself DOES NOT send out information by email to the caller/requester/initiator.
• The request item DOES send out information by email to the caller/requester/initiator.
• And finally the Catalog Task DOES NOT send out information by email to the caller/requester/initiator.

I've currently designed my workflows so that our technicians will only work with catalog tasks, but this prevents customer conversation.

A solution for this could be to use the request item record instead to work with the request but this makes it hard when the request has to be worked on from different assignment groups etc. making a workflow useless.

One solution could be to work with the request item as well as create catalog tasks when other assignment groups need to work on the request. This prevents customer conversation from these "sub-tasks" however as well as we need to teach the organization different work procedures depending on what kind of ticket they are working on which makes this solution not so pretty.

Has anyone here had this issue? How did you solve it?

Ideally we would only work with catalog tasks and simply ignore the request item and request and let the workflow handle them when it's time.

[Slava Savitsky · Accepted solution]

You can have all the work done on Catalog Task level. To allow communication between the requestor and the delivery teams, you can add the comments from the RITM level to the Catalog Task form layout. This way comments will be shared by all tasks.

[JimmieOdelius]

Is this correct then?

I will add a reference to the requested_item.comments and add it to the task form?

Is there anything I should watch out for regarding this? Adding a column like this to the task-table seems risky.

Regards

Jimmie

[Slava Savitsky]

Correct. In this case, you are not adding a column but rather displaying a field from the parent record on a child record form. This should not cause any issues as long as you set up ACLs and notifications appropriately. Remember that the field actually belongs to the RITM record, so ACLs and notifications need to be defined on that level.

[Slava Savitsky]

When there are multiple tasks assigned to different groups and no one owns the requested item, you end up with no one being responsible for the overall quality of service being delivered. So whatever approach you choose, make sure responsibility for the requested service is defined on Requested Item level (or better yet on Service level if you map your requests catalog to services catalog).