Workflow with Ad-Hoc approvers
Hi, all
I have a workflow where, between the Pending and Released statuses, there are seven Review statuses where, on the 5th and 7th, the reviewers are designated to be Ad Hoc (two different persons should be designated on-the-fly and no groups are assigned on the workflow criteria of these statuses).
What’s happening: when, at the end of the 4th step, its approver designates the Ad Hoc approver for the 5th step, the same approver gets assigned to the 7th step, and, after passing the 6th step, the system “approves” the 7th step automagically.
Is this behavior expected?? Is there a way one can still be able to have more than one status to be approved Ad Hoc and be able to assign different people?? Running on Agile 9.3.3.
Thanks in advance for any light on this subject!!
Ah Clovis I see you have found a distinct issue with the approval process. Since the system views one approval per account per change this has become an issue for you. Curious, why would you have say “Joe” approve at one stage then again at another? With some insight we may be able to offer you some better practices.
Hi, Patrick,
So… I presume I should be assigning a group as the approver for one of these two steps, right?? No big issue on that, will just have to convince the customer…
Any other best practices are very much welcome!!
Best,
Not exactly Clovis. A user is a user no matter if they are named or come in off a user group. i am curious why this practice exists. I have always conceived that a user approves for a single reason be it a peer review, a downstream system review, a managerial okie dokie review, etc…. It’s odd to me that you would want a user to approve twice so I am trying to better understand the business practice so I can help you with your issue.
Patrick,
In fact, I’m not wanting to have the same user approving twice. I would like the approver of the 6th step to be able to select another Ad Hoc user for the 7th step, but the system is assigning the same Ad Hoc approver of the 5th step and approving the 7th step automatically.
We have workflows that contain multiple Ad Hoc Review statuses as well, but I have not run into any issues like what you describe. We also have cases where the same user is added as an approver on multiple statuses, but they still have to manually approve for each status.
In the Status Criteria of the “7th step” – is there anything populated in the “Approvers” field? $APPROVER, perhaps? I would think that this would be defaulting more than just the Step 5 approver, if so, but it is a place to start.
Maybe also check the signoff time on the Workflow and/or History tab for the “automatic” approval. Does it match the step 5 approval? maybe the status change timestamp?
Is it possible that the workflow was approved at 7 and then demoted to a prior status? If so – this may just be a retention based on your SmartRule settings…
Hi Danny, thanks for your reply and comment!! Sorry for the delay, we had a holiday down here these past days…
It’s good to know that it is viable to have multiple Ad Hoc Review status on the same workflow. Based on your comments, what I’m thinking about is that, since it is the same user that’s running the test a single machine, it seems that, maybe, something on the browser’s cache is making the automatic assignment and approval of the 7th status. I’ll run the test again with the user on two different machines today and see how it goes. Will keep you posted.
Thanks again and best,
After doing some further testing today, I finally found I need to set AutoPromote=No on 4th and 6th statuses on the workflow in order to have its approvers use the Next Status button to take the workflow forward and, then, receive the window requesting the AdHoc approvers for the 5th and 7th step.
Thanks again for all ideas and help!!
Best regards,
Clovis Chenaud Jr.