Service Request with Optional Activites

Imagine you have a Service Offering on the Self Service Portal where, depending on the users answers, an activity must be performed or not.
It could be that the users requests a new workstation, and they can choose to have it delivered to their office and setup, or they can pick it up themselves. In this case the first activity could be to prepare the workstation, and the second, depending on the users wish, to deliver the workstation to their office. Ie. if the user picks up the workstation themselves we want to skip the second activity.

If you have an extension to your Manual Activity as below we can monitor specific fields in Orchestrator and act accordingly. If you have nothing like this in your Service Manager configuration see the ressources section in the bottom.

Create a new runbook and add a Monitor Object from the SCSM2012 IP and configure it as below.

Link it to an Invoke Runbook activity. This runbook will do the real work, ie. set the status of the Manual Activity to "skipped" as follows:

Monitoring runbook

Configuration of the Invoke Runbook activity

The invoked runbook

Configured the Update Object activity as this

All in all fairly simple. Start the monitoring runbook and create a Service Request Template. Add a Manual Activity and go to the Extensions tab and enter __skip__ in the UserInput4 field.

Now create a Request Offering based on this template. A single user prompt should do the trick:

Map the answer to the activity.

Go to your Self Service Portal and submit a request on your newly published Request Offering. Or if you, like me, haven't set up a portal yet, create a SR using the console.

Wait abit and for the Orchestrator magic to happen. The history tab of the Manual Activity should look something like this. Also notice that the Service Request was completed automatically - there were no activites left to be done.

If you find that there are tons of workflows with optional activities, you may consider adding a field specifically for this purpose and monitor that instead.

Ressources:

• How to Extend a Class in the Authoring Tool