Working with Activities


Overview

Tasks

Included with

Tivoli Change Management user

Overview

Working with activities

Changes often require work by many people or departments within an organization. A change may involve so many tasks or people that there seem to be changes within changes. These smaller changes that depend on the larger, or parent changes, are referred to as activities in Tivoli Change Management.

A change can have an unlimited number of activities. Each activity has a unique ID and contains the same types of information that a change does, including a category, a status, and a name. You can define tasks and schedules for activities as you do for a change.

Note: If you add or join an activity without specifying any tasks for it, the start date defaults to the date needed. In this case, the percent complete is shown as 100% when the activity is first added to the schedule because of the percent complete algorithm.

Activities associated with the change have the same approval method as the change. In addition:

  • For Approves All Activity changes, any approvers added to activities are added to the Tivoli Change Management Approval table. However, none of the additional approvers are considered part of the approval process for the change.
  • If you modify the approval method of the change to Depends on Activity, then the approvers of the activities are evaluated in accordance with Depends on Activity rules.

  • For Depends on Activity changes, any approvers added to activities are considered part of the approval process for the change.
Activities as tasks Any activity you add or join from the Tasks tab of the Change dialog box automatically becomes a task.

All tasks associated with the activity are merged into one task and appear on the Tasks tab of the Change dialog box. Individual tasks appear on the Tasks tab of the Change dialog box.

As resources complete a task for an activity and assign it completed status, Tivoli Change Management calculates the percent complete by taking the number of completed tasks and dividing by the total number of tasks. The resulting value appears on the Tasks tab in the task line for the activity. Tasks are not weighted by estimated or actual hours when calculating percent complete.


Tasks

Adding an activity

When you add an activity, you are essentially creating a new change and including it as a subordinate, or child, of the current, or parent, change. The activity depends on the associated change.

Note: For Depends on Activity changes, you can save an activity only if:

  • The activity is new and is being added to the change
    or
  • You have system administrator rights

To add an activity:

  1. From the Change dialog box, choose the Activity tab.
    Result: The Activity tab appears.
  2. Choose Add.
    Result: The Activity dialog box appears. Notice that the Activity dialog box is identical to the Change dialog box with the exception of the dialog box title.
  3. Complete the Activity dialog box in the same way you would complete the Change dialog box.
  4. Choose OK.
    Result: The Activity tab appears with the new activity name, and the activity name appears as a task on the Tasks tab.
Joining an activity When you join an activity to a change, you include an existing change as a subordinate of the change on which you are currently working. You can join a change only once as a subordinate activity because you are actually joining the change itself, not a duplicate. However, each parent change can have multiple changes joined to it as activities.

To join an existing change as an activity:

  1. From the Change dialog box, choose the Activity tab.
    Result: The Activity tab appears.
  2. Choose Join.
    Result: The Changes dialog box appears, displaying all changes that can be joined as an activity.
  3. From the Changes table, select a change.
  4. Choose OK.
    Result: The change appears in the Activity list of the Activity tab.

Copying an activity

Copying activities is useful if you want to create a new activity that is similar to an existing activity. You can copy the existing activity and then modify it as needed.

To copy an activity:

  1. From the Change dialog box, choose the Activity tab.
    Result: The Activity tab appears.
  2. Under Activity, select the activity you want to copy.
  3. Choose Copy.
    Result: The Duplicate dialog box appears.
  4. From the Status List, select a status.
  5. In the To box, type a new name for the change.
  6. Choose OK.
    Result: The change appears in the Activity list of the Activity tab.