No delegate option in workflow

[asim Shah]

Hi Members

There is no ootb function available to delegate the classic workflow approval. How can we manage the situation when the workflow approver(direct manager) is on leave without contacting to administrator to change the assignee.

Please advise

[asim Shah]

anyone???

[Jose Rodriguez]

Hi Asim,

The classic workflow has very specific and limited characteristics.
OOTB does not have something that can help you, and before thinking about coding SDM I recommend that you can define your business rule and use PAM.

Regards.

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José Rodríguez Escamilla
ABS
México
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[Michael Mueller]

Well. How do you delegate work for an incident or change ?
In my understanding, tickets are assigned to groups and assignees. If there i no assignee, the members of the group are responsible to take care of such tickets.
The first thing an analyst , as a member of the group , should do, is to fill in himself to the assignee field, so that others of the group can see, that someone is already working on this ticket. If an assignee can foresee, that he is not able to fulfill the work, he should remove himself from the assignee field, so the ticket is on the group queue again. He can of course, also ask his colleague, it he can transfer his tickets to his colleague.
If an assignee is not able to fulfill his work unforeseeable, there should be some kind of the group manager, who can re-assign these tickets.

So, in general, the trick is, to work with group responsibilities rather than with personalized responsibilities.
The same can work with workflow tasks.

Some customers support this setup additionally with specific status, like "transferred", "acknowledged", and "work-in-progress", to even better handle responsibilities, or make the situation of a ticket more obvious.

Hope this helps a bit
Regards
..........Michael


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Principal Services Consultant
HCL Enterprise Studio
Germany
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[asim Shah]

HI Michael

I agree with you that if no assignee is there then group member are responsible to take care.

We have workflows which has each department Direct Manager Approval as a first approval and it pick contact's supervisor field via Action Macro. Once Direct Manager approves then it flow to next level which has groups attached on each workflow task. But the First approval i.e Manager Approval only has assignee which is dynamically pick from contacts table as i stated.

So when the Direct manager goes on Vacation, all the request create during his/her absence remain pending until manager come back the end user contact SDM Administrator to change the assignee or approve on behalf on his /her Manager.

So we want some delegation / automation here such that when user Manager goes on vacation, all the request assign to his assistant. something like this we want to achieve.

Many Thanks

[Michael Mueller]

Hi Asim.
Thanks for your explanation. That helps a lot to understand your challenge.
Some thoughts I have in mind:
As you already have some logic in place to pick up the Direct Manager from the contacts supervisor field when creating new workflows, you might be able to use the same "place" to implement the vacation rule.
Two things you need to define:
1) How is someone able to tell the system, that he is in vacation , or just not available.
2) How do you want to configure the deputy of a contact?
If you have these two informations in the database, it should be easy to adopt your assignment logic to reflect the availability of the direct manager and to select his deputy , if he is not available.
However, if someone missed to tell the system that he is not available, you still might have tasks, that are assigned to contacts , which are not available. So, some kind of monitoring and manual re-assigning would still be neccessary.
Hope this helps
Regards
......Michael

------------------------------
Principal Services Consultant
HCL Enterprise Studio
Germany
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[Aamir Khan]

Hi Asim

you can achieve this by publishing custom srel (contact) attribute zAssistant in cnt object. SO when manager want to go on vacation, he must select his assistant before go so all the request will assign to his assistant and after manager return, he should remove his assistant. In this way, managers has the responsibility to take care of it.

After that you can write action macro like below an attach it on workflow
if (requester's supervisor's assistant is null)
{
 assign to requester's supervisor
}
else
{
assign to requester's supervisor's assistant
}