Catalyst is in open beta and the product is actively evolving.
What journeys don’t do
Journeys don’t directly control access provisioning (adding users to IdP groups, granting app roles, assigning licenses). You can set a journey to trigger access requests and track the completion in tasks, but you will need to handle the access logic itself in Access Management.Cross-team journeys
Journeys frequently cross team boundaries. IT, HR, Security, and Finance each own pieces of onboarding. Catalyst handles this natively: tell it which team owns each task and it will route assignments accordingly. Each team sees only their tasks in their queue, while the journey as a whole tracks end-to-end completion. You can include workflows and automations from other teams to attach to tasks.For information on how cross-team journeys appear to admins and end users, see Cross-team journeys.
Create a journey in Catalyst
Use natural language instructions
Open a Catalyst chat and describe the journey in plain language. The more concrete you are about who does what, in what order, the less Catalyst has to ask back. A useful prompt covers:- The trigger: What kicks the journey off (a form submission, a date, an event in your HRIS)
- The tasks: The discrete steps, in order
- The owners: Which team or role handles each task
- The dependencies: Which tasks must wait for others
“Build me an onboarding journey for new engineers. When there’s a new-hire event in Workday, IT should create an Okta account and order a laptop in parallel. Once the account exists, HR runs a background check and the hiring manager gets a task to prepare a welcome doc. The new hire’s first-day checklist task only opens after the background check is complete.”
Use a flow chart diagram
You can also upload a flow chart diagram. For a list of file formats, see File Attachments. Catalyst will read the diagram and create a journey based on the chart. As with a text description, the more concrete information you include, the fewer follow-up questions Catalyst needs.Attaching workflows to tasks
Each task or subtask can optionally have an attached workflow that runs automatically or after collecting inputs from the employee. If the workflow requires inputs, the journey task shows a form to collect them and runs the workflow once the assignee fills it out. Tell Catalyst to attach a published workflow to a task by @-mentioning it in the prompt, or describe a new workflow for Catalyst to build, publish, and attach. For example:“Attach the @Create Okta account workflow to the ‘Set up accounts’ task, and run it when the task starts, using the new hire’s email from the journey.”For more information about tasks and attached workflows, see Journey tasks.
Live journey preview
Your draft is immediately testable in the Catalyst chat. You can run it on yourself or a test user without publishing first. If a task is assigned to the wrong group, a dependency is backwards, or you want to split a step into subtasks, just tell Catalyst in the same chat and it will update the draft in place. When you build a journey with Catalyst and initiate a test run, Catalyst’s run-details panel automatically switches into a live journey preview. The preview shows the overall layout of the full journey page, with tasks organized in columns by assignee. For more information on tasks and task states, see Journey tasks.Publishing
When the journey looks right, click Publish in the side panel. That exposes it to the help desk agent and any external triggers (scheduled runs, webhooks, HRIS events) so it can run for real employees.Use databases to save journey state
A journey often needs to carry state across its tasks. For example, in an employee onboarding journey, an account ID created in an earlier task is needed by a later task once a background check clears. Serval databases store that state and let you reference it from tasks and tickets throughout the journey. You don’t have to build this manually. When you build the journey in Catalyst, describe the state you want to keep. Catalyst gives each journey type its own entity type in a Serval database (for example,onboarding-journey-state), keyed by the journey ticket ID so each journey has exactly one row, and sets up the steps that read and write it.
Tips for working with Catalyst on journeys
- Name tasks the way employees will read them. “Sign offer letter” beats “Execute employment agreement workflow.”
- Be explicit about parallelism. Specify if two tasks can happen at the same time. Otherwise, Catalyst may chain them sequentially.
- Mention reminders and SLAs. If a task should escalate after 2 days, tell Catalyst up front rather than bolting it on later.
- Test before publishing. Run the draft against yourself or a test user to walk through the task assignments and dependencies in a real ticket queue.
- Ask for a flow chart diagram with dependencies. As you’re building a journey, you can ask Catalyst to show you the journey as a flow chart diagram with dependencies. Catalyst will create a visual diagram you can inspect and use.
- Use manual tasks for tasks without attached workflows. Manual tasks have no attached workflow. The assignee completes the task on their own and finishes it by clicking Mark complete.
Troubleshooting
Why are tasks not showing up in the columns I expect?
If a task isn’t in the column you’d expect, check its assignee. Journeys group tasks into columns by assignee:- Any task assigned to the requester (for example, the new hire) shows up in the requester column.
- Any task assigned to a member of a Serval team shows up under the column for that team.
- Any task assigned to a user who isn’t the requester or a member of a Serval team shows up in the stakeholder column.
Why are certain automation tasks not automatically firing?
This normally means the workflow still requires inputs, or the workflow is set with Use a form to collect inputs. If you want to auto-run an attached workflow that requires inputs, tell Catalyst to auto-submit inputs with hardcoded values or variables from the journey, like the new hire’s email.Why are some journey tasks showing up in a team column but others aren’t?
A team column shows tasks that are assigned to a member of that team and hides the rest. If a task you expected to see is missing, check its assignee.Related
Catalyst overview
What Catalyst can and can’t do
Catalyst workspace
Get familiar with the Catalyst interface
Changes and reviews
Stage changes, propose reviews, and configure approvers
Authoring workflows
Natural language prompting, manual edits, versioning
Journeys
Coordinate multi-step, cross-team processes