How do you use approvals on tasks?

[lgaertner]

Hello,

I am currently trying around with approvals on tasks and I am missing some functionality. Therefore I thought about asking the community on how you are working with task approvals.

One example is, that a specific task should be approved by a group of team leads if the price offered by an external agency is higher than a defined budget. I would like to have the possibility to let the approver automatically leave a comment about the reason for rejecting an approval. At the moment I do not see any option to do that, so the approver has to switch to the task updates "manually" and leave a comment. 

I would love to hear from you, how you are using the approval process on tasks and how your colleagues accept this process.

Thanks in advance.

Regards

Lars

[VictoriaLinn]

Hi @lgaertner - I have used task approvals for several teams in the past, but the functionality in Workfront is SO limiting. You're right in that the only option to leave feedback is in updates, which limits the ability to report out rejection reasons. I only recommend task approvals if your use can't be solved with a proof/document approval...the inability to edit the custom form or even assign the task while pending approvals has been a sticking point to our teams in the past (and workarounds are tough on this too).

Hoping for the ability to set if a task can be edited while pending approval one day (https://experienceleaguecommunities.adobe.com/t5/workfront-ideas/ability-to-edit-custom-forms-while-...)

[skyehansen]

I agree with Victoria -- I find approvals on tasks to be limited -- because our users just ignore them and keep working through the rest of the project timeline. We have projects which get to the end of the project timeline and the approvals only get addressed when the Project Owner tries to close the project. It would be different if any task with the approval task as a predecessor physically could not get completed unless the upstream task is approved.

I usually try to pair any approval process with a strong enforcement commitment. What has worked in the past is to have the commitment from the individual/s who is supposed to approve, a strong backup team, and a process to scrutinize an approval report and complete approvals inside the SLA.

[tmccleaf]

Hi Lars, 

If you tell your users to review their task Approvals on the Home page, a Comment box will pop up when they click Approve or Reject, allowing them to leave a comment without having to navigate to the Updates tab on the task.  Alternatively, you can provide users with a task report that has all of the approvals they need to review and create a custom links that will take your users directly to the Approval Tab and the Updates tab from the report to leave a decision or make a comment.

Create two custom calculated fields, Approvals Tab URL and Task Updates URL

Task Updates URL with this calculation - CONCAT("https://YOUR_COMPANY_NAME_HERE.my.workfront.com","/","task/view?ID=",{ID},"&activeTab=tab-task-updates")

Approvals Tab URL with this calculation - CONCAT("https://YOUR_COMPANY_NAME_HERE.my.workfront.com","/","task/view?ID=",{ID},"&activeTab=tab-task-approvals")

You'll need to add the fields to a custom task report, and recalculate the expressions in the background when you create them if the form is already associated with your tasks so that the URLs are generated. I typically confirm that the URL's are generated then add them to an Admin only section so the user doesn't see them. 

On a Task report add a column with this textmode code for the Task Updates URL:

displayname=Notes & Comments

link.url=customDataLabelsAsString(Task Updates URL)

linkname=direct

namekey=name

textmode=true

usewidths=true

valueexpression=STRING("Click to Add Notes & Comments")

valuefield=Task Updates URL

valueformat=customDataLabelsAsString

width=100

Add another column with this textmode code for the Approvals Tab URL:

displayname=Approve or Reject

link.url=customDataLabelsAsString(Approval Tab URL)

linkname=direct

namekey=name

textmode=true

usewidths=true

valueexpression=STRING("Approve or Reject")

valuefield=Approval Tab URL

valueformat=customDataLabelsAsString

width=100

To Skye's point about the need to enforce the approval so that it's not completely overlooked, you can set it as an 'enforced' predecessor to another task so that the successor task can not begin until the approval task has been completed. You can do this by simply adding an 'e' to the predecessor. 

You can find more information about task predecessors here.  

Hope this helps!