SX R14

This release includes new features and enhancements for improving the user experience, configurability and auditability.

This release aims to improve process workflows and add more configurability.

The highlights include the capability of relating ‘Service Configuration Items’ to new offerings, the introduction of root cause analysis (RCA) techniques for investigating problems comprehensively and providing the configurability for combining consumer and service provider approvals for work items.

The scope of this release extends to approvals, asset and configuration management, consumer portal, incident management, problem management, change management, service board, fulfilment and task management modules.
 

Approval

• The introduction of combination approvals for work items will now help in configuring all the necessary approvals from approvers associated with the service provider organization and the customer company. However, this functionality will not be available for service provider offerings if the approver is an individual or a group of the consumer company, since it would be a security violation.
   
• This will ensure that that all the necessary approvals for work items are configured with ease.

Asset and configuration management

• The introduction of the  Assignment management system (AMS) redirect link on the CI form will allow support users to view and edit assignation rules from the ‘Chain’ entities section of the CI form directly. They will not need to navigate to a separate page. This will help in improving their user experience and productivity.

Consumer portal

• Both the ‘Request number’ and the 'Item number’ corresponding to a request will now get displayed in the search result section irrespective of the criteria used for executing the search. The flexibility of searching for requests based on request numbers or item numbers instead of the combined string will increase ease of use.
   
• The attachment section in the ‘Work items detail’ module will now display all the attached files in tabular format. This will also include the date/time of attaching the document in the format chosen by support users. This will provide a history of all the attached contents for future audits.

Incident management

• The flexibility of capturing incident impact on CIR (Critical incident review) forms will help in quantifying the actual impact of service interruptions caused by critical incidents, precisely.

Problem management

• The ‘Record problem findings’ section for an ‘Under investigation’ problem ticket has been revamped with the inclusion of the following RCA techniques –
  • 5 whys – This will allow investigators to drill down causes and effects and locate the cause of problems up to five levels
  • 5W 1H – The investigators will be able to add details such as ‘What’, ‘Where’, ‘When’, ‘Who’, ‘Why’ and ‘How’ that correspond to the problem tickets. 
  • Convergence-Divergence – This technique covers the phases ‘Discover’, ‘Define’, ‘Deduce’ and ‘Determine’ in the problem ticket.
  The inclusion of RCA techniques in the problem management module will help in conducting the root cause analysis, properly.

Change management

• The capability of configuring the lead time for 'Normal changes’ supports the flexibility of scheduling change requests at a future date. Once the lead time is configured on the instance, the change cannot be submitted unless the scheduled date is greater than, or equal to the current date plus the lead time. The change schedule will become non-editable after the approvals are received.  
  
  This will provide the flexibility of scheduling changes to a forward date to allow for the planning of changes, aligned with the lead time policy of the organization. 
   
• The capability of including the past-dated change schedules after the implementation of emergency change requests will help in recording the activities for ‘Retrospective change’. The capability of viewing the past-dated change schedules helps in improving future auditability.
   
• The configuration of closure codes (e.g., successful, unsuccessful) in the ‘Post implementation review’ (PIR) section provides the closure codes associated with ‘Normal’ and ‘Emergency’ change requests already completed, along with the (PIR) details. This will make it easier to identify change requests according to their closure statuses.   

All modules

• The character limit of the description field has been increased for all types of records to capture relevant information in more detail.
   
• The introduction of an additional relationship type called ‘Caused by–Has caused’ will provide the flexibility of recording and relating change requests to the service interruptions and incidents that needed emergency changes for resolution. This will provide the information for conducting accurate audits in the future.

Fulfilment module

• A new functionality has been introduced in the fulfilment engine to auto-fulfill the parent ticket once all the related tasks have been closed.

Task management

• The data value in the ‘Actual start date’ and the ‘Actual end date’ fields for assigned tasks will be auto-populated with the actual date/time of performing the activity, as given below –
  • Actual start date – This field will be populated with the current date/time only when the task is acknowledged and the status is moved to ‘In progress’ from ‘Assigned’.
  • Actual end date - Also, when the task is completed or canceled, the actual end date is auto-populated as per the current date/time.
  This will help in accounting for the actual time spent on the fulfilment ticket by the fulfiler

Service board

• The functionality of displaying the listed approvers only if they are relevant to the chosen work item type will make it easier for support users to configure approvals correctly.  Also, the approval levels applicable for making changes and requesting items can be hidden, and vice versa, while configuring the approvals for requested items and changes.
  
  The enhanced configurability will make it easier to configure the correct approvals for request items and change requests.
   
• A new functionality has been introduced on the service details page for relating service CIs to ‘Service request’ and to  ’Incident' offerings before deployment. This will help in capturing the details of the service for which the service interruption has been reported and the details of the service user placing the request.   

DRYiCE SX™ is a catalog-based service management product  for all employee services.

For product-related inquiries, please reach us at support.dryice.ai@hcl.com