How does your company onboard new employees?

[Andrew Meza]

I wanted to ask the community how does your company onboard new employees using ITSM?

Right now, we have a request form called "New Hire Request" and only managers can submit this form. This form asks 4 major questions, that'll branch into sub questions.

1.) Is this new hire a FTE or Contingent Worker?

This will ask them the basic info like name, employee number etc. so that we can create the account in Active Directory.

2.) Will the new hire need any hardware?

We have a walk-up tech corner that supplies all hardware to new employees. If they opt in for the hardware a sctask is created for them to prepare the hardware for the arrival of the new employee.

3.) Will the new hire need any purchased software?

Our sys Admin have a catalog of purchased software like Visio, Project, Adobe Pro, etc. and if they opt in here the sys admins will purchase a license, assign, and configure the hardware so that when the employee arrives, they have all their essential software.

4.) Will the new hire need any additional application access?

We have many systems being in the financial industry. We have loan applications, core system, and 15+ systems they can opt in for in order for the employee to have correct application access when they arrive.

After all of this the employee will have the correct permissions in AD, all the hardware necessary to be able to perform the job, any purchased software (our image has the base software just about all employees need), and any additional application access so they can process loans or whatever the case is.

My problem right now being a developer is that I am using flow designer to help automate all of this. It starts of nice but towards the end I am literally running out of flow designer space as I cannot add any more steps.

Here is the break down:

If user is an FTE (full time employee) or contingent worker (contractor) create a task for the support team

create sctask#1 - Support Team - Create AD Account

If user says YES to hardware (just about everyone does)

create sctask#2 - Tech Corner - Prepare Hardware

If user says YES to purchased software (this is a hit or miss but in flow designer I need to build it out for all listed options.

create sctask#3 - Sys Admins - Order Adobe Pro License

create sctask#4 - Sys Admins - Order Adobe Suite

create sctask#5 - Sys Admins - Order Visio License

create sctask#6 - Sys Admins - Order Power BI License

create sctask#7 - Sys Admins - Order Project License

If user says YES to Additional application access (this is a hit or miss but in flow designer I need to build it out for all listed options.

you get the point but listed below is the longest portion with 16 total systems we offer access to.

create sctask#8-24 - various teams - Create account for [Application Name]

By the time I use all of IF statements my flow designer is incredibly long. If you have any advice or what to share what your company does for onboarding, please share how your team performs this. At this rate we are still improving this form and it's only going to become a longer process.

[Tim Deniston]

You can use Subflows to bundle all of the child tasks together for a particular branch. In your scenario, I would split the Software and Additional Applications tasks into two subflows. It makes your main flow easier to read and alleviates the size issue you're experiencing. 

[Sandeep Rajput]

@Andrew Meza Instead if cramming all the steps inside a single flow, it is advisable to create multiple sub-flows and each subflow should cater to a specific requirement. 

e.g. One subflow should be responsible for Create An AD account another one should be responsible for Prepare Hardware. Call these subflow inside your main flow and provide appropriate inputs from your main flow to sub flow and process output of subflow inside your main flow. This way you will never run out of steps inside your main flow and you will be able to reuse your subflow in any other flows where-ever needed. This will make your flow logic modular and will help you in debugging any issue a lot easier.

Hope this helps.

[Andrew Meza]

I tried this but is there a way to pass RITM variables into the subflow?

Ideally, I would want to create a subflow for hardware. In the scTask I want to show the variables of the hardware that was selected. So the logic in the subflow would be: 

If Laptop,cell phone, and mouse is selected > create scTask

I would want that scTaskto show the 3 items they selected.

Or is it best practice to simply keep at variables in the RITM?

[Sandeep Rajput]

@Andrew Meza Can't you extract catalog variables using Get Catalog Variable Action in the flow and pass the extracted variables in the subflow as an input?