Managing Approvals

[MarkHahn]

Hello WF Community, We are trying to determine the best way to set up and track approvals. We work them off of tasks, usually a copywriting or design task. So when a worker completes a task, the approval system routes it for approval, but the worker often doesn't realize that the deadline they were given includes the time needed for routing the approvals and making any corrections before it goes to our internal client. We have tried a few different solutions including tasks for the approvals, but that seems kind of klunky and you lose the routing loop that you get from the approval process. Any thoughts? Mark Hahn SEI Investments Company

[VicAl]

My solution may be what you already tried. I would make it 2 tasks with a predecessor: Copyright/Design (with the Approval step in it, but have it triggered by setting it to Complete : Pending Approval). This way they work the task as normal (Status goes from New to In Progress to Complete : Pending Approval) Final Changes And make Task 1 a Predecessor to Task 2, so if you have an individual assigned to Task 2, they'll be notified when Task 1 is complete and know they can do the final Task. Vic Alejandro, PMP, CSM | IT | Sr. Technical Project Manager Denver Water | t: (303-628-7262) | c: (303-319-6473) "http://www.denverwater.org/"> http://www.denverwater.org INTEGRITY | VISION | PASSION | EXCELLENCE | RESPECT

[EXP_-_DustinMa]

Hi Mark, Vic has a good way to do it, or you could build in a lag time via approval settings. Keeping in mind, this lag time would affect all approvals within your system, here's how you would do it: 1) Go to Setup . 2) Expand Processes . 3) Select Approvals . 4) In the upper right, click on Settings . 5) Determine the lag time you want to add: Minutes Hours Days Weeks Months Elapsed minutes/hours/days/weeks 6) Save Changes . Hope this idea helps! Thanks, Dustin Martin Tier 2 ASE Workfront

[JennTa]

We have a similar approval process, and we worked around it by setting up a 3 day lag time between the deliverable task to the delivery task. This allows for rework if needed. For some reason the lag time at the system level (as mentioned above) didn't work for our agency.. I can't remember the exact reason now but we did try it. Here's an example of what it looks like: Create infographic: This task has an approval on it Send infographic to client: The predecessor on this task would be 1+3d Hope that helps! Jennifer Tanabe Director, Project Management Vertical Measures