Planning and Building an Investigation Request Workflow

In this lesson, we’ll discuss how to plan out an Investigation request workflow and the things to consider when doing so. We’ll discuss some of the possibilities that Upchain can provide within an Investigation request workflow and scope out an example workflow that looks at a redlining process.

Before you start:

Think about the sorts of business processes you already have in place in your organization that you use for investigation-type purposes, such as scoping out initial designs, feasibility studies, incorporating customer feedback, redlines from a shop floor technician, design change instructions, etc.

Planning out an investigation request workflow

In this video, let’s discuss the sorts of things you may wish to include in your workflow and lay out an example workflow here. This will provide the foundation for how we build the workflow in Upchain later on.

Key takeaways

1. Investigation requests can be used to initiate the change process, promote discussions, determine the impact of a change, and find the best possible solution.
2. The Investigation request workflow determines what the purpose of the Investigation request will be at your organization, and you can create more than one workflow.
3. Always plan out your desired business process first, including the optimal path in your workflow as well as any steps that can have more than one outcome.
4. Consider using the Decision primitive to add decision points to your workflows that you can assign to individuals or groups of people, and Task primitive to assign work to specific people at specific points in the workflow.
5. Review the Upchain documentation for a summary of each of the primitives available within a Change request workflow.

Building an Investigation request workflow

In this video, we’ll start to build the workflow that we outlined in the first video by adding and configuring the primitives we need in our optimal path. 

Key takeaways

1. All workflows must have a Start and Stop primitive.
2. Update primitives are quite useful to ensure the Investigation request status is updated appropriately so all users who may view it understand its current state.
3. The Decision primitive is used to assign a decision task to a single person, everyone with a specific role on the project team, or a group of people on the project team. You can further specify how many people must complete the task before it’ll move on.
4. The Task primitive is used to simply assign a task to a specific user, specific role, or user team on the project.