Activity Questions

Question

Hi,
I have several questions in regards to activities and issues I am encountering as a young and learning Service Manager Back-Up Admin.
First off: I have service request templates set-up for Access Requests that encompass several applications/systems. It uses one Service request with anywhere from 4-20 Activities that are assigned to other teams that handle the specific application or system
access. The Service Request stays assigned to my Queue in the Help Desk. In these Requests, I have used Parallel Containers to have Activities go active at the same time, and then inside that container I have other Sequential Activies which contain Systems
that require more than one teams attention. My problem is, two fold.
1. My activities on the Service Request "grey out" and cannot be clicked to open the activity, once the Service Request goes to Completed Status. This is a pain, as we have to manually search the MA# when a user calls in to question an account
set-up or something. The funny thing is, on regular service requests that just have the single activity we use as default, the activity does not do this. Is there a way to set this where it will not grey out the activities and we can still double click them
to open them from the Service Request?
2. Is it in ANY WAY possible to either have activities run parallel without a parallel activity container holding them all? When I do it this way, the container becomes the parent and not the Service Request itself. My runbooks are three times as large trying
to get child activities of every Parallel and Sequential Activity on my Request to do automation on data. Also my teams are complaining because they have to click the parent link 3-5 times to get to the Service request, since I have the Activities embedded
in each other to control their flow. if I could run activities in parallel without adding a parallel container, or if I could find a setting that would ignore containers as parents, my work and my workflow would be MUCH better.
Thanks for any suggestions/help you can provide.
Just to clarify, we started this activity system for access requests because there is no easy Child-Parent relationship ability with Service Requests that could be set-up in templates. If there is a better way, I would love to hear it. 

Answer 1

You're not alone :) Pardon the following dissertation..
Regarding your first concern, are you sure the service requests aren't closed? I just tried in my test environment..when a service request is completed, the activities are still accessible. When the service request is closed the activities are not accessible. 
I'd consider it undesirable behavior. Fortunately, most undesirable behavior can be fixed with custom controls. This is the second time this week I've seen someone complain about it. I can't make any promises, but let me look inside the activity control
and see if I can build a custom control that will leave the control turned on so you can continue to open activities. If you don't want to wait for me, submit it as a bug to the Service Manager team and see if they'll fix it in an update rollup (fair warning..it
might be by design based on ITIL standards)
Regarding your second concern, there are a couple approaches you can take.
You can't run activities in parallel at the parent work item level without modifying the parent form (by replacing the default activity control with a parallel activity control). And there's no guarantee it would work anyway. The activity workflows themselves
may be tightly coupled to sequential activity behavior at the parent work item level. It would require a good bit of testing and validation and probably isn't worth pursuing.
One possible alternative would be to create a "parent work item" relationship between all activities (regardless of depth) to their parent work item (be it a service request, incident, change request, whatever). Such a feature would require a custom
workflow to generate the relationships when a work item is created. As for the form links..again, you'd have to create custom controls to apply to all activity forms that utilize that new relationship. But your runbooks would only have to get one relationship
instead of sifting through 2, 3, or 4 levels worth of child activities.
As for building a child-parent relationship ability with service requests, you could do it in a template..but you'd have to do it in the management pack itself. Basically, you'd create a new service request in your template that contains an activity that's
related to a particular "dependent work item" activity in your main service request template. Ultimately, your template would be a web of activities and sub service requests with their own activities. The out of the box request offering engine isn't
really built for it..so it would be tricky (if at all possible) to make sure the main request offering input is copied to all the necessary service requests in the template. I've never tried it, but it might be possible..and again, you'd have to do it in the
MP..the console just isn't sophisticated enough to do half the stuff that management packs can do. Note that this approach would likely create "service request sprawl" whereas your activities are clearly organized and grouped right now.
The easiest alternative would be to copy all important data from the parent service request down to the individual activities. In this way, the users wouldn't have to find the parent service request..everything they need is right on their activity's description.
A custom workflow or runbook could accomplish that and would be a lot easier than the template fiasco I mentioned in the last paragraph. You would have to be careful about changes made at the parent service request..your workflow/runbook would have to update
the child activities anytime important information was changed at the parent level.
To close out this novel, I'll look into the activity thing and see if I can't tweak the form behavior. Again..no promises..theoretically, it'll work..but reality and theory don't always get along.