Overview

With Business Process Choreographer you can model escalations for human tasks. An escalation is basically a notification that a specific state time condition has been met. For example, the manager of an employee might be informed via an escalation that a task assigned to the employee has not been finished within a specific period of time. You can specify escalations for tasks that are in a state of ready, claimed, or subtask. The time period until the escalation is triggered is calculated from the point in time when the task is set to the particular state.

Sample business scenario

To demonstrate the escalation features, this sample provides a simple helpdesk process: customers send a problem description to a business process, which routes the requests to human tasks. The owners of the human tasks answer to the problem description, and the business process sends the response back to the customers. Figure 1 shows the helpdesk process.

Figure 1: Helpdesk process

The process also contains the step SetMaximumTaskTime, which is responsible for defining the maximum time available for task processing.

There are three different user groups involved in the process: 'helpdeskstaff', 'helpdeskmanagement', and 'supervisors'. Members of the 'helpdeskstaff' user group have to answer to the problem description. The team leader and the manager of the helpdesk personnel are members of the 'helpdeskmanagement' user group. The quality manager of the company is a member of 'supervisors'. Figure 2 shows the staff assignment for the helpdesk task, the user groups, and their members.

Figure 2: Helpdesk task and staff assignment

Figure 3 shows the HelpDesk interface, which is implemented by the helpdesk process.

Figure 3: HelpDesk interface

Figure 4 shows the HelpDeskTask interface, which is implemented by the human task.

Figure 4: HelpDeskTask interface

In the scenario, escalations are used to satisfy a fictive service level agreement: the team leader, the manager, or the quality manager will be informed when the response time exceeds the given time limit:

1. The team leader will be informed 2 minutes after the task was created if nobody works on the task.
2. Two minutes after escalation 1, the helpdesk manager will be informed if nobody works on the task.
3. The quality manager will be informed if the task is not finished after the maximum task processing time.
4. The quality manager will be informed if somebody works on the task but does not finish the task within 4 minutes.