Announcing Quick Tasks - the Newest Member of the IBM Case Manager Task Family

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When IBM Case Manager was first introduced, its powerful task model changed the way our clients built their case style solutions. No longer was it necessary to try and define and manage a giant process map that had to handle every possible route work had to move and any exceptions that might arise.

ICM tasks are defined as children of a case type and when activated, each task instance becomes a child of its parent case instance. With this relationship, tasks can be made smaller and more specific to the job they are trying to get done in support of a case.

There are several flavours of ICM tasks.

• Automatic Tasks start on their own when a case is created or a precondition is met (like a property being set to a specific value or a document of a certain class being filed in the case). These tasks are usually associated with a workflow and will launch it when they start and become complete when the workflow completes.
• Manual Tasks are similar to automatic tasks except that it is up to the case worker to decide when to start them.
• Discretionary Tasks are like the other two except that they don't even show up in the case until a case worker adds one. They can be added to the case as many times as needed and are usually used to handle ad-hoc work assignments or exception processes.
• To-do Tasks are a little different in that they are not associated with a workflow. Their job is to indicate that something needs to be done or that some data needs to be checked off or collected. The case worker marks them as complete.
• Container Tasks, as their name implies, are containers of other tasks. They have the same settings as the other task types, but their job is simply to activate or enable any of their children when they start.
• Custom Tasks are ones where empowered case workers can create a new workflow on the fly to handle something that not been predefined as part of the case solution but may be one that is now commonly needed.

All of these task types have a varying amount of setup associated with them and are usually defined upfront as part of the solution. What if a case worker just wants a simple way to remind themselves or others of something that needs to be done?

This is where IBM Case Manager 5.3.1's new Quick Tasks come in. They are true ICM task objects that get associated to a case but they are also quick in that a case worker can create a list of them as fast as they can type. Quick Tasks were added to the existing To-Do widget.

Unlike To-do Tasks, they can also optionally be assigned to another case worker, given a due date, contain document attachments and have their own discussion thread.

And for those of you who like a little scripting fun, the To-do widget now includes an incoming wiring event that lets you create one of more Quick Tasks programmatically using the following payload:

  { "caseEditable": caseEditable, "quickTasks": [{"name" : quickTaskName, "description": description, "dueDate": date object}] };    For example, you might define the payload in a Script Adapter widget as shown in the following example:  if (confirm("Add these tasks to this case?")) {     payload.caseEditable = payload.Case.caseObject.createEditable();     payload.quickTasks = [        {"name":"QT1",        "description":"Quick Task 1 Description",        "dueDate": new Date("2017-06-21")},        {"name":"QT2", "description":"Quick Task 2 Description",        "dueDate": new Date("2017-06-23")},        {"name":"QT3", "description":"Quick Task 3 Description",        "dueDate":new Date("2017-06-25")},        {"name":"QT4 ", "description":"Quick Task 4 Description",        "dueDate": null},     ];  };  return payload;

Like Custom Tasks, Quick Task are enabled/disabled on each case type. Once enabled, you can use role specific pages that include the To-do widget configured to display both Quick Tasks and To-do Tasks or one or the other.