CiviCase multi-category/ multi-instance support
Recently having had some discussions with a few of our clients and participants of CiviMeetup, We have realised that there are a lot of interest in using CiviCase to manage many different types of workflows in different organisations. Some of them require a change to evolve CiviCase’s data model to a multi-level structure.
To support this idea, I have attached a diagram to demonstrate the multi-level structure. We have suggested that a new field “case type category” would provide a lot of flexibility.
The basic idea is, an organisation’s business is made up of many different workflows for different business areas, such as Service delivery (i.e. a Helpdesk, Counselling service or Delivering care/housing support), Prospecting (i.e. major donors, grants bid writing in), Awards (i.e. Grants out), Volunteer vacancy management and even perhaps as a set of tasks for an event etc. These completely different workflows often are managed by completely different teams (who would need to manage their own case types), produce very different data and therefore require very different analysis and reports. "Case Type” is not sufficient to support all these needs as there may be several case types which apply to any specific business area.
Each team would probably want:
- The ability to create/configure case types of their category. For example with a volunteer vacancy managers they may want to create multiple vacancies, or with Grants, there may be multiple open opportunities. For Major donors they may split these between different types of donor - i.e. trusts, individuals, government which have different timelines and activities.
- The ability to add additional fields at the case type level for each category.
- Only having access to cases with the case type category they should have access to
- Some modifications to the case screen for cases of that case type category.
We've made a more detailed draft proposal of what we need to do to eliminate these caveats. The main target is to bring out the full potential of CiviCase as CiviCRM’s workflow management suite.