Clarity: Process Action items do not use the Initial Grace Period for Escalations.

Products

• Clarity PPM SaaS
• Clarity PPM On Premise

Issue/Introduction

Description:

Process Action items do not use the Initial Grace Period for Escalations.

Steps to Reproduce:

1. Create a process with a single step. I created my process on the Change Request object.
2. Create a manual step to send an action item to one user with only one option like Done.
3. Set up an escalation Grace period. I chose 3 minutes and 5 minutes. The customer chose longer periods of times. Choose a different user than the one used in step 2 to send escalations to.
4. Set up an appropriate post condition on the step so that it will wait for the user to mark the action item done.
5. Point the start step to the step you created and the step you created to the Finish step.
6. Validate and activate the process.
7. Go to the admin tool, Objects, Action Item.
8. Open the object and click on attributes.
9. Change the default for the due date to tomorrow (if you are willing to wait that long) or choose Specific Date and set the date to today and the time to 10 or 15 minutes in the future.)
10. Create an object instance and launch your process.
11. Wait until the default date you set for action items that you chose in step 9.
12. Log in as the user who was assigned to escalations in step 3. Look at assigned action items.

Expected Results: Escalation should occur at Action Item Due Date + Initial Grace Period
Actual Results: Escalation occurs at the Action Item Due Date

Technical Details:

This working by design.

The escalation rules for action items:

• Escalation date for action item with due date: Action Item Due Date
• Escalation date for action item without due date: Action item creation date plus Initial Grace Period.

Note: For Clarity 8.1.0 and later, all action items have a default due date of the start of next week. This means that it is not currently possible to create a process action item with no due date.

Solution:

Workaround:

If a particular customer wants an escalation date for a particular process to be the action item due date plus initial grace period, a very easy workaround is to xog the process out and then modify the XOG input so that:

aiWDueDateAction="ESC_ACTION_DUE_DATE_PLUS_IWP"

When the process definition is XOGGED back into Clarity, the escalation date will work the way they want.

The following update statement can be used to update the escalation rules for all action items for a customer:

UPDATE ESC_DEF_RULES
SET ai_w_due_date_action_code = 'ESC_ACTION_DUE_DATE_PLUS_IWP'
WHERE object_type_code = 'actionitem'
AND parent_object_type_code = 'process'

Note: This update statement will have to be run again anytime new processes are added to ensure that the new processes have the same Escalation Default Rule as the rest of the customer processes.

Status/Resolution:

There are several different enhancement requests surrounding the way customers would like Escalation default rules to work. None of them have been implemented at this time.

Keywords: escalation, defaults, escalation rules, process, bpm, action item, CLRT-41590, CLRT-16055, CLRT-25089, CLRT-22004, CLRT-7233, CLRT-43884, erq, improvement.

Environment

Release: NCSVCS05900-8.1-Clarity-Service Connect-for MS-SQL
Component: