How Should I Test and Roll Out Scheduled Processes for My Users?

Before you roll out your plan for scheduled processes, test it out by submitting the processes to run according to the plan. And see if all the scheduled processes finish without any issues in a timely manner.

This testing should give you insight to your environment’s capacity so that you don’t risk affecting the performance. As your organization’s needs change, your scheduled process needs might change too. It’s a best practice to test your plan on an ongoing basis to ensure that your scheduled processes are performing optimally.

When you’re ready, communicate the plan to your organization so the users know when and how often to run which scheduled processes. Also inform them of some things to keep in mind when they submit processes:

• Use parameters where possible: Instead of leaving parameters blank, enter the necessary parameters, to streamline the processing and get more precise results.
• Verify parameters before submitting a process: When users submit a process with parameters, they should pay special attention to what they enter for the parameters. After they submit the process, they can’t change the parameter settings, even if the process has not started running. What they can do is cancel the process and submit it again with the parameter values they want.
• Consider regional time zones when scheduling processes: Scheduled processes run according to the time zone in the regional settings of the user preferences. When users submit a process, they can select a different time zone, and that time zone overrides the regional settings. Be aware that time changes, such as Daylight Saving Time (DST) can affect scheduled processes, and users must take that into account when scheduling processes.

  For example, if users want to schedule a process to run on the day that a DST time change occurs, they should select a time zone that observes that time change. Some time zones have a different date when DST starts (Asia/Amman - 30th Oct). In this case, they must cancel the old schedule and create a new one.

• Consider making a note of the process ID: After users click the Submit button, they get a process ID for their submission. If users ever need to find this exact submission later, recommend that they make a note of the ID. This is especially the case if they submit a process to run on a recurring schedule. If they want to change or cancel the schedule later, they must act on this original submission, and the quickest way to find it is by process ID. But, without the ID, they can still use the search on the Scheduled Processes work area to find the submission, for example by submission time.