Setting goals and deadlines for task completion

You can set a goal and deadline for an assignment or approval to automatically enforce your service-level agreements. By default, goal and deadline times are measured from the time that an assignment or approval is routed to a worklist or work queue to the time that the assignment or approval is completed.

For example, you can define escalation actions to call attention to assignments or approvals that exceed the goal or deadline time.
  1. In the navigation panel, click Case types, and then click the name of a case type.
  2. On the Workflow tab, click Life cycle if Optional actions is selected.
  3. Click an assignment or approval step in a process.
  4. Click Goal & deadline.
  5. Select the Consider goal and deadline check box.
  6. In the Goal and Deadline sections, enter values in the fields to define the suggested and required completion times for the assignment or approval.
    Options include:
    Days
    Enter a positive integer.
    HH:MM:SS
    Enter a formatted string of positive integers that represent hours and minutes. For example, enter 04:15:30 to indicate that the goal is 4 hours, 15 minutes, and 30 seconds.
    Increase urgency by
    Enter an integer to add to the current urgency of the assignment or approval.
  7. To send email notifications when the goal and deadline are not met, configure the notification by doing the following actions in the Goal and Deadline sections:
    1. In the Notify sub-section, select the users that you want to send the notifications to. The system sends emails to these users when the suggested and required completion times for the assignment or approval elapse.
    2. If you selected the Participants check box in the previous step, click Manage participants to select the case participants that you want to send the notifications to and click Done.
    3. In the Message sub-section, select whether you want to use the default notification message or compose a notification message .
    4. To compose a notification message, enter the subject of the message in the Subject field and click Compose to create and style the message by using the rich text editor. Select fields and reuse existing messages in the editor to compose the message more quickly with relevant information from the case.
  8. Click Save.
At run time, your application detects when the goal and deadline are not met and adjusts the urgency of the assignment or approval. To see how much time you have left to complete an assignment or approval, refer to the header of the form.