Terminology

Event

An event is something that happens to a task during its lifecycle.  The data related to an event can be found in audit logs, at the task level, or in related tables e.g. journal entries, attachments, approvals, etc.   The typical lifecycle of a task is defined as create time to closure time.   Events are defined by activities

Activity

• An activity is a type of event.  Examples of activities in Service Management include;

• The assignment group or state of an incident changing during the resolution of an incident

• The SLA status of a task moving from in progress to breached

• A change been marked as completed

• The priority of an incident changing from Medium to High

• Escalation of a task

• Notifications

• Journal entries

• Approvals

Step

A step is a transition from one activity to the next.  For example, an incident moving from New to Work in Progress.   A step can be associated with multiple variants (refer below) and exist in the workflow of 1 or many issues.

Variant

A process variant is a sequence of process activities with a start event and a final event. The total number of converted process variants represents a process in this context. Each variant differs from the others by at least one activity. The various process variants can be mapped in one process model or in separate process models, whereby a single model represents the variants using several process paths. Process Mining automatically derives process variants of a process from the data. Any number of cases can run through one variant.

Loop

A loop in a process means that a certain process step is repeated more than once.   Loops are of interest in process analytics as they help to spot rework and inefficiencies in a process