Standard Steps

Standard Steps

Most processes, at least initially for a council, are comprised of standard steps. As well as needing to be manually completed*, these steps dictate the SLA for a process. The following illustrates the panel that slides out when a standard step is added:

Standard Step Configuration

* It is technically possible for a standard step to be automatically completed if the complete step API is used.

There are three tabs:

Details

This tab provides the following functions:

Name - the name of the process that both staff and citizens will see

Description - the purpose of the process

Allocate this step to - a set of allocation rules to enable the step of the process to be assigned to someone. The options are:

Allocation Type	Details
Allocate to a specific user	This will allocate this step always to a specific user selected
Allocate to an organisation	In OpenProcess it is possible to set up Organisations. This enables you to assign a step to that organisation.
Round robin allocate to a group of users	In OpenProcess, there is the concept of Groups that users can be associated with. If this rule is set, OpenProcess will assign each step of this type created to each of the users within the group one after the other. So if ten processes with this step are started and there are ten users associated with that group, each will be assigned one to work on.
Allocate to a user of a previous step	Sometimes a process needs to go back to a user that completed the step before, or even a step 3 or 4 back. This enables you to assign it to the user that completed a specifically defined step.
Allocate to who completed the last step	Where OpenProcess Flex is licensed, branches can exist in processes. This means that you will not necessarily know the last step that was completed as it is dynamically set. Therefore unlike the last option, in this case it will allocate it to whoever completed the last step, irrespective of which step they completed.

Target Duration - this sets the SLA for the step

Calculate target date using - there is currently only one option to this, which is Working days only. It essentially means that weekends are not used in the calculation of the SLA.

Supervisors - For those users permitted to access Supervise Tasks, the thing that controls which steps they can see in there is this setting. Against the step you can assign the Supervisor group of users that are permitted to see this step of the process. Normally each stage in a given process will have the same Supervisor Group but it is possible for each step of a process to have a different supervisory group if necessary.

Actions

The Actions tab is where you can set up notifications to be sent when a process starts and when it completes.

The options for notification types are:

All of the Action options

The first thing to note is that irrespective of the number of actions added, the one that will be used will be the one present on the customer's OneVu Profile. This is shown here where their preference is WhatsApp:

It is vital to note that if you support new channels for people to get progress updates e.g. SMS. You need to ensure that OpenProcess ALSO has an action for that too. I.e. if a person's preference is SMS and you have not set up an action for SMS they will not be sent a notification.

As you can see there is a maximum of 5 different options but the only one there by default is:

Send An Email

With Send An Email the following options are presented when you select to add it:

Email Options with standard Email

As one can see there are options to send the email:

• To the customer (in this case it is the indexed citizen held).

The citizen needs to have selected SMS as their preferred contact method for progress updates within their OneVu Profile.

• To the person currently allocated the step

• To a fixed address (normally where you're emailing an internal inbox)

Each of the options has a From address, Subject template and Body template to use for the email.

You can add all three options and can add multiple email actions.

The Fixed Address option also has another field for you to enter the email address you want to send the email to.

Send An Email via GOV.UK Notify

With this option, you'll need to have already provided IEG4 with your GOV.UK Notify API details and have already created your email template within the GOV.UK Notify application.

The citizen needs to have selected email as their preferred contact method for progress updates within their OneVu Profile.

As you can see below, you need to provide the Email Template Id and the Subject and Body of the email you want to send. Details of how this needs to be configured and set up in GOV.UK Notify can be found here.

GOV.UK Notify Email Action

Send a Text Msg via GOV.UK Notify

This function works identical to the above except that it sends a text message.

The citizen needs to have selected SMS as their preferred contact method for progress updates within their OneVu Profile.

Again, you provide the relevant Template ID for the SMS template in GOV.UK Notify, but this time the only field to enter is the personalised content of the message:

GOV.UK SMS

Send a Facebook Messenger Message

With this option the only field available is 'Message' reflective of the fact it will push whatever content is entered in here into the Facebook Messenger message:

The citizen needs to have selected Facebook Messenger as their preferred contact method for progress updates within their OneVu Profile.

They need to have connected their Facebook account to their OneVu account to achieve this. See here for more details.

Send a WhatsApp Message

With this option the only field available is 'Message' reflective of the fact it will push whatever content is entered in here into the WhatsApp message:

The citizen needs to have selected WhatsApp as their preferred contact method for progress updates within their OneVu Profile.

They need to have connected their WhatsApp number to their OneVu account to achieve this. See here for more details.

Fields

The ability to pass Fields into a step exists for all users of OpenProcess.

But the Fields Tab on a step is only relevant to those users that have OpenProcess Flex licensed.

The Fields function enables you to set up Fields that must be completed as a part of a process step.

This functionality is useful where something will always need to be recorded in a step and you want to introduce best practice.

I.e. in the example below these two questions need to be answered in order for the step to be completed.

So the functionality effectively creates a check list function for process steps.

Mandatory Fields in a Process