Improve Windchill Change Notice Usability

[lhoogeveen]

Please make the Windchill Change Notice experience easier and more intuitive so more companies can start using the powerful Windchill Workflow capabilities. Enhancing the Change Notice Templates and out of the box emails would be very helpful so people companies don't have to create custom workflows as often. See images below.

[JeffZemsky]

@lhoogeveen 

Many of these concepts are supported today - rather than try to address item by item might be easier if you PM me and we can setup a call

These include:

1. Defining roles/participants for tasks and preventing them from being changed can be configured using Teams and Resource pools.  The Multiple Assignee/Reviewer gives you much more flexibility here, even for a single select (unless you want a wide open single select)
2. Defining which task types need or don't need reviewers can be controlled via type mgmt
3. Hyperlinks in Description fields (Rich text attributes since 11.1)
4. Change Notice number can be added to the Task List as well as other PBO and related object attributes.
5. The workflow Instructions and Descriptions are areas that can be configured for your organization to easily set for your needs.
6. Agree that the email notification needs work for sure.  There is some configuration available here - I will update a link for that later.

[TomU]

@JeffZemsky,

Would it be possible to do a demonstration/presentation showing how to take an out-of-the-box system to one configured to work like @lhoogeveen is requesting?  Maybe at the PTC/USER winter event or in an online format?  I think there are a bunch of us that could benefit from seeing how this is done.

[lhoogeveen]

@JeffZemsky  That's exciting to hear that a lot of the functionality already exists! I'm more than happy to have a call with you and Tom about this this but I also agree with @TomU... there's a lot of people/companies that would benefit from seeing this list you mentioned. I think an online format would help the most people - a webinar that gets recorded/posted to YouTube would be super helpful. Maybe even a whole series for Change Requests, Promotion Requests, etc. Maybe we'd get some good ideas for how to make the out of box experience better and easier to get going - which was a significant part of this idea.

Sometimes PTC makes support articles summarizing different resources about a topic. Do you know if there's something like this for Windchill Change Notices or Change Management?

[JeffZemsky]

@TomU - great idea.  With Windchill 11.2.1.0 content coming soon and then the PTC/USER Forum coming up an early February target for a webcast would be a good timeframe. 

[jbailey]

I would be interested in this webcast

[lhoogeveen]

Additional Change Notice Ideas:

• An option to specify whether initially selected objects should go in the Affected By or Resulting Objects when doing Create New>Change Notice.
• Options Controlled in Change Notice Templates:
  • Ability at the CN Template or individual Task to control options like Optional Review Allowed and Participant List Table. This would be in addition to the current site/org/product level options. Having the options in the template provides more flexibility.
  • Ability to include/exclude/require tasks in the implementation plan based an answer to custom attributes. Example - if BUY = YES, then have a task for purchasing.
  • Post Release Tasks/Notifications - I believe this is accomplished with custom workflow today.
  • An option for whether to have an implementation plan or not. If no, then implementation would have two change task steps.
• Required attributes should just be a warning when creating/editing any Windchill templates since the required attributes will often be left blank in the template to be filled in later by the users. Currently the required attributes must be temporarily turned off to create/edit templates that want to have the attributes blank in the template.
• More human readable workflows visualization - something like the ThingWorx Workflow Builder.

Also, here's a similar idea for Promotion Request Improvements.

[BjoernRueegg]

@lhoogeveen Very well summary. Thanks

"More human readable workflows visualization - something like the ThingWorx Workflow Builder."

I hoped that PTC will overwork the wizard as they removed the applet. But they only reprogrammed the exact same. They also adopted the icons from the 90s 1:1.

The workflow engine from Windchill is very powerful, but it should get one day a redesign to compete with other systems.

Something to add to the workflow topic.

• Provide language specific instructions and titles for the user tasks