Last year, one European company seriously considered switching off itsemail for internal communications —and not for security reasons. Instead,it had come to the conclusion that theflood of internal email was overloadingits workers and undermining high-prioritycore tasks needed to keep the companycompetitive.

Enterprises worldwide, bogged downby overflowing inboxes, likewise dream of shutting off internal email to stopmail flooding and increase employeeproductivity. Just consider the effects oframpant internal email communication:

■ As issues escalate and quick emailresponses fly back and forth, theresulting mail storms often continuelong after an issue is resolved.

■ With so many contributors addingtheir own two cents, there’s a lack ofclarity as to who is actually workingon a task.

■ When new waves of email messagesarrive in your inbox, past issues mayscroll out of sight without being properly addressed.

Workflow does a great job of keeping tabs on processes that have been automated up front, but whatabout ad hoc processes that can oftenonly be resolved with email? Since mostemail systems simply duplicate mail and

offer no transparency outside your ownpersonal inbox, how can all involvedusers stay up to date on the most recentstatus of these processes? There must bea way out of this mess!

There is. SAP NetWeaver ’04 gives your users the chance to createcollaboration tasks on the fly, so that several colleagues can work simultaneously and sequentially on one task, and everyone can see whateveryone else is up to.

You’ll find access to create collab-oration tasks from two points in the SAP Enterprise Portal:1 the UniversalWorklist and the Collaboration Room.Any user (yes, it really is that simple)can create a collaboration task eithersequentially, assigning users to the taskso that they can either work together ina chain or pass the task from one user to another as they complete their work,or in parallel, so that users work on the task simultaneously. A combinationof both techniques is just as easy to achieve.

Key Benefits of Collaboration TasksCollaboration tasks are most appropriatefor knowledge workers — anyone who

Collaboration TasksBring Structure to Chaos

Regular Feature

Process Technology Tattler

Alan Rickayzen, SAP AG

spends a lot of time in their email inbox reacting to incoming mail bysearching for requested information or delegating actions to colleagues.The benefits of creating collaborationtasks — transparency, accountability,and timeliness — are tremendous.Let’s look at each of these benefits inmore detail:

Transparency: At any time, all users involved in the task will have a snapshot of its current status.They will see what has been donealready, along with the comments of other colleagues working simulta-neously on the task. It’s a bit likefollowing a forum discussion on theWeb.This snapshot helps users avoidredundant effort and enables moreconstructive work.

Accountability: Any task that hasbeen assigned to you will remain in

✔

✔

1 Creating collaboration tasks is available through SAP Enterprise Portal 6.0, which is part of SAPNetWeaver ’04.

This article appeared in the Apr ■ May ■ Jun 2005 issue of SAP Insider and appears here with

permission from the publisher, Wellesley Information Services (WIS), www.WISpubs.com.

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your inbox until you complete it, oruntil it is no longer necessary due toexternal influences like the initiatorretracting the task or reassigning it tosomeone else. Everyone else knows youare working on a task, and when youcomplete it, the task item disappears.The inbox is the same place you receiveany work items generated by work-flows, so the principle is the same:when your inbox is empty, you canleave work with a clear conscience. Ifyou reject a collaboration task, suchas when your workload is too high orwhen you do not have the necessaryskills, then the task goes straight backto the colleague who generated it, andhe or she can take immediate action.

Timeliness: Often tasks becomeredundant, like when the initiatorretracts the task or a colleague co-assigned to the task completes iton their own without needing yourhelp. In these cases, the tasks areautomatically removed from every-body’s inbox, so everyone can get onwith other work, sparing redundanteffort. If a deadline is drawing close,then you will be warned in advanceso you can prioritize your tasksaccordingly.

✔

Before looking at the different typesof tasks that you can create, it’s worthconsidering in more detail where you candeploy them. Let’s now look at how tocreate these tasks from the UniversalWorklist or the Collaboration Room,which both can be accessed via SAPEnterprise Portal.

Creating a Collaboration Taskfrom the Universal WorklistConsider an example of a spontaneousevent, such as a phone call from aprospective customer asking if a certainproduct can be configured in a specificway and delivered to a particular countrybefore the big trade fair in June. If yourcompany expects such inquiries on afrequent basis, then you probably alreadyhave software or a workflow in place togenerate an answer for this customer.However, if you rarely receive this type of inquiry, then there will likely be noinfrastructure available to instantly answerthis query. Here’s where you’d simplygenerate a new collaboration task fromthe Universal Worklist.2

Selecting the “New Task” button (seeFigure 1) in the Universal Worklistbrings up a wizard to guide you throughthe steps to create the task, whether it’sa single-step task (assigned to one person)or a multi-step task (that many peoplewill have their hands on).

Single-Step TasksAs a result of the customer callmentioned earlier, let’s say you need toassign a colleague with knowledge of the country in which the trade fair isbeing held to determine which productcolor would be most attractive to localvisitors. In this simple, one-step task,an initial screen (see Figure 2 on thenext page) is shown, where you can describe the task and select who is to perform it.That’s it.

Of course there are plenty of addi-tional features you’ll find yourself usingas you become more familiar with the wizard interface. For example,you can:

■ Set a deadline that will causereminders to be sent (via email),and highlight the task in the user’sinbox an appropriate length of time(customizable) before the deadline is reached.

■ Add observers (such as stakeholdersor managers) to the task who cantrack the progress without beingactively involved.This is similar to adding observers to workflowprocesses — you are basicallysubscribing them to the process sothat they are kept up to date and you no longer have to answer requests for status updates.

■ Give observers the chance to confirmthe outcome of the process or torequest a follow-up.

■ Enable observers to, at any time,add attachments to the task tohelp the colleagues who areexecuting tasks.The attachment

2 For more information on using the Universal Worklist,see my article “Implement a Central Inbox for One-Stop Access to Work Items from Any BusinessProcess” in the October-December 2003 issue of SAP Insider (www.SAPinsider.com).

Figure 1 The Universal Worklist Allows You to Build a New Task at the Touch of a Button

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can be a URL to relevant informationor desktop documents such as aspreadsheet or text.

■ Let observers track tasks in thetracking view of their Worklist and receive notifications wheneverprogress is made, according to yourspecifications. You can indicate that

you never want to receive notifications,only want them when the task iscompleted, or want them wheneverone of the subactivities is completed.

As you can see, it is very simple tostart a single-step collaboration taskfrom the Worklist, and it gives you andyour team far more long-term control

Figure 3 Creating a Multi-Step Collaboration Task from the Universal Worklist

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than trying to deal with the taskthrough ad hoc phone calls or emails.

Multi-Step Tasks: Parallel orSequential ProcessesAs a result of the customer call, perhapsyou need to assign a local sales repre-sentative the task of determining thebest color scheme to use, get a localmarketing expert to select whichbrochures to print, and have a memberof your translation team estimate theeffort involved in translating theproduct brochure. Or maybe you’d likeall of these users to work on thesetasks simultaneously.

In this case, the wizard can alsohelp you string these multiple taskstogether in parallel or in sequence,which is far simpler than you mightthink. If you prefer to have your colleaguesworking on the task separately but inparallel, then you select the “Separatetask for each assignee” option.

Sequential tasks are just as simple.After creating your main task description,you select the option “Add Step” and asecond task is added to follow the initialtask. Repeat this until all your tasks arein place (see Figure 3), then terminatethe sequence and launch the first of the

Figure 2 Creating a Single-Step Task from the Universal Worklist

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string of tasks. When creating thetask in sequence, you can evenassign several users to the task; thefirst person to select the task fromtheir inbox automatically becomesthe processor.This makes the itemredundant for the other users, so itautomatically disappears from theirinboxes.

Creating a Task fromEmbedded WorkflowsYou can also create an “Ad-HocRequest” from the Universal Worklist,an option displayed in the embeddedworkflows running in the mySAPBusiness Suite (see Figure 4). Oftenthe task is in an embedded workflowbecause it requires support fromcolleagues, such as collecting moreinformation or getting consent at a senior level.These tasks can bedecomposed into smaller collaborationtasks by selecting the work item andcreating a new collaboration task from the work item detail display,also shown in Figure 4.To make thissimpler, the text from the original work item is copied directly into thecollaboration task.

This means that, for example, incases where approve/reject decisionsmust be added as a step in the work-flow, the process is transparent to the user.The user interface is identical, whether the decision is part of an ad hoc process or an embedded workflow.

Creating a Task from theCollaboration RoomJust as you can create a collaborationtask from the Universal Worklist, youcan do the same in the CollaborationRoom (from the SAP NetWeaver ’04release) simply by selecting the “NewTask” button.

tasks themselves are displayed quitedifferently. In the Collaboration Room,any room member can see all the tasksthat both you and your colleagues needto perform (see Figure 5), as well as theprogress of those tasks, irrespective ofwhich room member has been assignedto the task.

Types of Collaboration TasksRegardless of where you create a collab-oration task, here’s a look at the differenttypes of tasks that you can create:

1. Standard

You’ll frequently find yourself using thestandard task, which is a generic task(like the one shown back in Figure 2)allowing you to create your own descrip-tion of what needs to be done. Once youhave launched the task, your recipientswill work on it, adding comments as theygo and eventually confirming that theyhave completed the task. With standardtasks, you can comfortably leave yourtask assignees in peace and follow theirprogress online.This is most useful whenyou’d like a colleague to complete a task

Figure 4 Creating an Ad Hoc Request from the Universal Worklist

Figure 5 Viewing Tasks in a Collaboration Room

However, even though the two methodsuse the same underlying software, the

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for you, and confirm that he or she has succeeded.

2. Request for Feedback

The predefined “Request for Feedback”task (see Figure 6) allows you to collectexpert opinions from your colleagues. Aswith other task types, you can allow yourcolleagues to decline to participate ifthey are already overloaded (and youwill be informed immediately, so that no time is lost waiting). In this case you can also ask for the feedback to beanonymous so that you can poll opinionswithout having the experts influenceeach other.

This task, as well as the “Request for Nomination” (discussed below), isdifferent from the standard task becausethe complete processing logic — forexample, how many opinions you need to receive before you can consider the task closed — is embedded right in the task.

3. Request for Nomination

The “Request for Nomination” task is tailored for collectively selectingsomeone for a job or task. You send out a request to colleagues (see Figure 7) that asks for their sugges-tions, and they go about the process of agreeing on who the final candidatewill be.

This type of task comes equippedwith some useful options so you canspecify that nominees are notified of

Figure 6 Request for Feedback

✔ Note!When collaboration tasks havebeen assigned to you, they willappear in your Universal Worklist(shown back in Figure 4) alongwith your workflow and othertasks, but you won’t see yourcolleagues’ tasks.That way, youcan prioritize your own work,without the clutter of seeingeveryone else’s.

Figure 7 Request for Nomination

Recipients can refuse togive feedback (featuredisabled if responses areset as anonymous)

Responses canbe sent usingNotificationService

Responses can beset as anonymous

Quick response option, whichoffers a preconfigured set offeedback categories

Nominees can refuseto participate

A contactlist can becreated, andnomineesare assignedto it

Once the task hasbeen assigned,nominations will besuggested; whetheror not the nomineesare informed oftheir nominationdepends on the“Notify Nominees”checkbox

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their nomination, or you can keep thewhole thing secret until a consensus is reached on who will be responsiblefor the task.

✔ Note!As of SAP NetWeaver ’04,standard tasks, requests for feedback, and requests for nomination are the three types of collaboration tasks available.You can expect to see additionaltask types in future SAPNetWeaver releases.

ConclusionCollaboration tasks give colleagues a better platform on which to worktogether, performing tasks without the chaos and limitations of email or

telephone. Both participants andobservers can follow what is going on in real time, and avoid working ontasks that are obsolete because someoneelse has done the job already.

The best thing about these collab-oration tasks is that no development is necessary. All your users can createtasks directly from their UniversalWorklist or Collaboration Room withoutprior training and in such an intuitiveway that they will see their productivityincrease right from the word go. And asindividuals personally see the benefits of taking advantage of this feature,the company as a whole will benefit as ad hoc processes become transparentand controlled. Who knows? The time and energy currently lost in flurries of email could soon be a thing of the past.

To find more about creating and working with collaboration tasks, and to see an SAP Tutor demonstration of what collaboration tasks look like in more detail, please visithttp://service.sap.com/bpms.

Alan Rickayzen has been with SAP since 1992

and in data processing since 1988. Since

1995, he has been performing development

work as well as process technology consulting

for various major US customers and, as a

result, has amassed a good deal of technical

knowledge in collaborative process technology.

Alan Rickayzen is co-author of the book

Practical Workflow for SAP, available at

www.sap-press.com, and may be contacted

at alan.rickayzen@sap.com.

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