Not every user action fits neatly into a stage of a case lifecycle. One challenge I’ve run into while designing workflows in Blueprint is how to model actions that can occur at any point in a case lifecycle.
A claims adjudication use case is a good example. While the overall claim follows a structured lifecycle, adjusters often need to perform activities such as:
Review coverage
Request additional documentation
Investigate liability
Manage reserves
Initiate payment review
Escalate an issue
Communicate with external parties
These activities do not always occur in a strict sequence and may be invoked multiple times throughout the life of the claim.
How are others handling these scenarios?
Do you model them in the primary lifecycle?
As stage-specific actions?
I’d love to hear the patterns and best practices others are using.
With the example you mentioned there are a number of ways those details could play out.
For argument sake, let’s say that half of those tasks are primary objectives running in parallel (because they don’t have to be done in a particular order) and half of those tasks support their primary actions. The way I would structure it in blueprint is to define separate flows in a stage for each primary process. For those things that get kicked off in parallel, it will be easy to modify the stage post-import to make those processes run in parallel. Within those flows I would account for the escalation tasks.
If you have a whole process, like conducting outreach that can be invoked from one of these steps, I would add that as an alternate stage (for now) and then add an automation to reference the alternate stage. It won’t actually change stage on import, but it will serve as a signal to the dev team what is expected. The dev team likely won’t deliver this flow as an alternate stage, it might just be a sub flow that we replace the change stage shape with post-import, but this will allow you to define the step, add content to it and increase what you get out of the import.
From a preview perspective, there will be no changing of stages, the best we can do is to show the UI for particular steps and if we want to show the alternate steps, we might temporarily include them in a primary flow long enough to mock them up and show them, but that can get the point across during this phase.
