A critical part of managing any workflow process is ensuring that tasks get assigned to users at the right time and that there is a system to follow up and ensure that tasks are completed on time. Ruly’s Task Management feature automatically assigns tasks based on the current status of the workflow. Users must complete their step in the workflow in order to close out their task and advance the workflow to the next stage.
I will show how this is accomplished using Rules and Tasks, and go over some examples to highlight the power and flexibility of this feature.
Both Alerts and Tasks use the bell icon in the top toolbar to notify users. What is the difference?
An Alert is a notification to a user that they need to do something. A Task is a notification that forces the user to complete something before the task can be closed.
Tasks cannot be ignored or dismissed without completing the task.
The starting point for creating a task is to create a Rule. The rule is the set of conditions that will result in a task being assigned. In this example, the rule fires when a new user is created. The rule assigns the user a task to review the T&C agreement.
The rule that supports the above workflow is shown below.
The secret to enforcing tasks is completion conditions. When those conditions are met, that workflow step will be completed, and the next step in the workflow will be triggered.
In this example, the user will simply check the “I Agree” box, agreeing to the terms and conditions. More complex conditions can be easily set up as well.
Completion conditions are configured in the same way as rules are, as shown in the screen below. In this example, the completion condition is that the “I Agree” toggle is turned on by the end-user.
Note the Display Location option above. If the Popup option is chosen the T&C form will be displayed automatically and the user will have to complete the task right away.
By using this simple Rule in conjunction with a Form that displays the policy text, we can ensure that all users review and agree to our terms and conditions.
This example is the case where an employee goes on vacation and needs to delegate tasks to others while they are away.
A rule automatically generates the task by looking at the vacation schedule for the employee, and when the date approaches, a task is added that forces them to delegate any open tickets they are working on to others.
Completing the Delegation form closes out the task, and assigns their open tickets to another employee.
In this example, we will look at how tasks can be used as part of a continuous workflow process, where several players are involved. In an agile software development process, a task is assigned to testing (QA) to review and approve a story before it goes to the next step.
A Rule creates the task in the same way as above. In this case, however, the task is edited before it is sent to QA.
Tasks are created in the background, but they can be sent either in the background or interactively as shown below.
The QA person sees the task added to their bell icon. To complete the task the completion conditions for the task were configured so that the QA Approved toggle must be checked, and QA Notes must be entered before they can Submit the story to the next step in the workflow.
A second rule is configured to handle the case where the QA person rejects the story by pressing the Reject button.
Escalation processes can also be configured using rules, that will notify management if tasks have not been completed within the set time constraints. Task management is a powerful component of workflow applications, to ensure work is completed and gets done on time.