How-to

Managing Lifecycle Stages

To provide a clear understanding of where your users are within a business process, Alloy Navigator offers a graphical progress indicator showing lifecycle stages and outlining the stage where each ticketClosed(Change Request, Incident, Problem, Service Request, Work Order) or purchase order is currently at.

NOTE: The graphical progress indicator appears only in Alloy Navigator web applications, i.e. in the Web App and in the Self Service Portal.

For example, the following lifecycle stages are initially available for Change Requests:

  • Submission: Assigned, Draft
  • Approval: Pending Approval, Rejected
  • Planning: On Hold, Approved
  • Implementation: In Progress, Implemented
  • Review: Tested, Failed
  • Close: Completed, Close

Each stage is mapped to a set of Change Requests' statuses. You can use the default stages or customize them to better suit your needs.

By default, each stage is mapped to a set of object's statuses as follows:

.

You can create new stages, rename them, and map stages to statuses. You can also change the order of stages and delete stages that are no longer needed.

To add a stage:

  1. In the Settings App, navigate to the Workflow and Business Logic > Service Desk > Change Requests > Classification > Lifecycle Stages section.

  2. Click New. The New Change Request Lifecycle Stage dialog box opens.

  3. Type in a stage name.

  4. You may want to be able to filter out some items when displaying this drop-down list to technicians as they perform certain steps within workflow. In this case, tag the list item: click Manage in the Tags section and specify tags associated with this stage.

  5. Click OK.

After you create and configure a new lifecycle stage, map this stage to the appropriate Change Request statuses.

IMPORTANT: A status can be mapped to a single stage. A stage can contain several statuses.

To map a status to a stage:

  1. In the Settings App, navigate to the Workflow and Business Logic > Service Desk > Change Requests > Classification > Statuses section, double-click the status that requires stage mapping.

  2. Choose a stage from the Stage drop-down list.

  3. Click OK.

To change the order of stages:

  1. In the Settings App, navigate to the Workflow and Business Logic > Service Desk > Change Requests > Classification > Lifecycle Stages section.

    NOTE: This order is used to display lifecycle stages on the progress indicator for the Change Request object record (see How to track the Change Requests' progress).

  2. Select a stage and use the Move Up and Move Down buttons to change its position. Repeat this step to reorder other stages as needed.

To delete a stage:

  1. In the Settings App, navigate to the Workflow and Business Logic > Service Desk > Change Requests > Classification > Lifecycle Stages section.

  2. Select a stage and click Delete.

TIP: Just like Change Requests, you can manage lifecycle stages for Incidents, Problems, Service Requests, Work Orders and Purchase Orders.