Issue Approval Challenge - allowing all users to issue decision despite rejection

Question

Stumped on a particular challenge regarding issue approvals. I have a use case where a particular issue type needs to route to a group of approximately 10-12 senior leaders for sign off (think traditional executive stage gate process.). All are expected to review simultaneously, as staging the reviews exec by exec would be time-prohibitive.

The challenge here is that if even one person rejects, the approval workflow halts, possibly before all stakeholders have had a chance to review. And re-engaging the workflow starts over and requires that everyone review again (which would normally make sense, but in this case, is not desired.)

The process owner would ideally like to capture all decisions (approvals and rejections) and then, if a consensus isn’t reached, escalate to higher level decision-maker. The only workaround I’ve come up with is to leverage a custom form to capture individual decisions rather than using the automated workflow. But that obviously comes with some serious tradeoffs in terms of automated notifications, progress tracking, and audit trail integrity.

Anyone solve for something like this that retains the core functionality of the approval workflow but without treating an individual rejection as a full veto?

Thanks in advance.

Lyndsy-Denk · Answer

This is a very interesting scenario; thanks for sharing! The only out-of-the-box functionality I’m aware of that can handle this is proof, but that comes with manual labor, too. I think you’re going in the right direction with a custom form, but you’ve homed in on the key problems with that approach. If you have Fusion, I suspect there’s a way to make the custom form approach work, but as an admin without Fusion, that’s just a theory.

Sign up

Login with SSO

Login to the community

Login with SSO

Scanning file for viruses.

This file cannot be downloaded