We have a lot of project templates that are used across the country for our different collateral or project types. We also have different people in different regions who are designated to approve of certain project types. We've tested many ways for approvals and nothing seems to be working, here are some things we tried:
- Having an approval task after a design task with the predecessor so that when design task is completed, approval task is ready to start, then we have the designated approver on the approval task. This gets complicated as there has to be an approver assigned and sometimes people don't mark tasks completed properly for design or for approvals. Then when a doc is rejected, they manually reopen the previous task.
- Having names attached to tasks for approvals. This created double work for both project owners and approvers, as project owners have to manually add the approval process name to each task, then when an approver has a document to approve, they had to approve or reject the task, but also approve or reject the document.
- Having approvals on the documents... Again, can be confusing as not everyone attaches or tags someone to approve the documents but then there were no tasks to show someone is responsible for approvals.
- Having placeholder names in approval tasks for designated approvers. This got complicated as sometimes the project owner did not remove an approver name or check if an approver was available for the approval and so some would assume someone else was approving, or would ignore the task altogether or was out of office or over bandwidth when due.
Is there a way to have approvals auto-populate for all tasks at outset of project rather than attaching one by one? I understand you can do that on a template, but since we have to check on bandwidth or confirm who is approving that can get complicated on each project. Or is there a way to put an auto approval associated with who uploads a document so that if X uploads it, then their manager Y would need to approve?
Ideally, it would be great to have task level approvals populate based on calculations from our project level custom forms even so that if you selected X project type, then the tasks would know to have a certain approval associated but in the meantime, just having a way to make approvals auto populate would be a good start.
