Getting started with task management

To resolve an incident, service request, problem, change request, or release, staff members need to perform tasks. They can create new tasks and link them to these records.

To enable your staff members to create a task, you must configure the following:

Users

For staff members to be able to create a task, assign them the Salesforce Platform license.

To add staff members, see Adding or editing users.

BMC recommends that you assign permission sets to your users. When you are upgrading to a major release, most of the profile permissions are updated automatically for permission sets. If you do not assign permission sets, you need to manually update permissions of each profile.

Queues

Create the queues to which tasks will be assigned. Your staff members need to monitor the designated queues and assign records to themselves or other staff members. You might have a dedicated member (based on your team size and number of requests) in your team who monitors the queues and does assignments.

For more information about adding queues, see Configuring queues.

Categories

Categories help you to classify data for reporting purposes. While creating a task, staff members select a category, such as Hardware and you can configure a workflow that assigns all the tasks with Hardware category to the Hardware and Maintenance queue.

You can also create parent-child relationship between categories by defining category types. Some categories are provided to you out-of-the-box, such as Account Administration, Network, and so on.

For information about adding categories, see Managing categories.

Status

Status of a record helps you to track the record through its life cycle. The following points help you in understanding the difference in the terminologies used to create a status:

• State: Determines if a record is opened or closed. Status will either has state opened or closed.
• Status: Determines where the record is in the life cycle, such as accepted, assigned.
• Stage: Grouping of various status values, such as Active, Approved, Broken Down, Development, and so on are grouped under In Progress stage. A stage tracks a record from Opening to Closure. The following stages are provided:
  • Opened
  • Acknowledged
  • In Process
  • Closed

You must assign the status that you add to one of the stages.

For more information about adding status, see Creating status records.

Impact-urgency-priority

Impact and urgency values of a record determine the priority assigned to the record. By default, some urgency, impact, and priority values are provided. The following figure shows how priority is calculated depending on the impact and urgency values:

Determine if you need additional impact, urgency, or priority values. If yes, also determine how the urgency and impact values will determine the priority. For more information, see Creating impacts, Creating urgencies, and Creating priorities.

Templates

Using templates, you can pre-populate fields on a form, which reduces the need to enter commonly used data, or create records to provide an automated workflow process. Templates help you to configure commonly used workflows, ensure consistency in the way information is captured, increase productivity and efficiency, and reduce errors.

Prepare a list of commonly occurring tasks in your environment, the tasks that are related to such tasks. Based on your requirements, add the templates. For more information, see Managing templates.

Workflows

Workflows help you in automating frequently occurring actions in your service desk. For example, you can create a workflow to send an email message to clients whenever a task linked to an incident raised by them is closed or created. BMC Remedyforce provides you some workflows out of the box. All these workflows are inactive by default. You must activate the workflows that you need.

The following workflows are provided out of the box for tasks:

• Notify the client when a task is closed
• Notify the client when a task is created
• Notify the client when a task is reopened

For more information about activating a workflow, see Configuring workflows.

Prepare a list of workflows that you will need in your service desk. Create the workflows that are not provided out of the box. For more information, see Salesforce Help.

Email templates

You can associate email templates with workflows or approval processes. Whenever a workflow is triggered, an email message is sent to the required users. By default, email templates that are associated with the out-of-the-box workflows are provided with the package.

If required, you can customize these email templates or create new email templates and associate them with the required workflows. For more information, see Creating an email template and Customizing an email template.

Administrator settings

The Remedyforce Administration tab is one-stop location for all the configurations that are available in BMC Remedyforce. It also contains links to the Salesforce Setup area. All the settings are categorized in various tiles. The following settings are related to setting up tasks:

Reports

Staff members and system administrators can use the Reports tab to view predefined reports. You can also create reports based on your requirements. However, only the system administrators can create additional report types.

For system administrators, data is also available in the form of charts and tables in the Dashboards tab. To enable staff members with Salesforce or Salesforce Platform license access the Dashboards tab, assign the Manage Dashboard profile-level permission.

Testing your environment

• Ensure that you are able to create a task in the Remedyforce Console tab.
• Ensure that you are able to create task templates and you can create tasks by using these templates.
• If you have activated workflows, ensure that the workflows are triggered at the configured condition.