Prevent user from approving for multiple change request approval groups

[pauline_handel]

I've been asked to prevent a user approving for more than one group for a CR. There is a post with a solution which predates change approval policies and doesn't work when using the 'Change - Normal - Assess' flow. I can't use a business rule to set a non-existent approval record to 'not required'; does anyone have a solution?

By default, a single approval record is generated per user per CR regardless of how many approval groups they are in for that ticket and, if they approve that, it approves for all the CR's approval groups that they're a member of. There is some behind the scenes magic which approves a group approval when it hasn't generated a sysapproval_approver record for that user/group/ticket combination. Whilst it's fine to have a single approval record for a user when using the default behaviour, it's problematic when a user wants to only approve for group A and not group B.

[bammar]

Probably alot of ways to address. You may consider dedicated approval groups and decide that no one can be a member of multiple approver groups ( at least multiple that can appear together for a CR) . OR you can make a business rule that after a person approves, system will check any pending approvals from other groups for that person and make it with a certain state to take it off the board, OR if the approval has to happen later then the new group approvls go out sans the person that has already approved. 

[pauline_handel]

Good suggestions but the only one I could use is the last one to remove the person from the Authorise stage approvals. I don't control membership of the approval groups or which groups are relevant for a specific affected CI. Since moving to the OOB Change flows, if a person is in two approval groups for a CR, an approval record is only created for one of those groups (which ServiceNow selects) so it isn't possible to set the other approval to 'not required'. However, if they approve that record, both groups are set to approved.

[bammar]

I see, if you can orchestrate the order of the approval groups even in the slightest way like - suppose 2 approval groups get sent out the approvals at the same time, maybe you can do a 10 second pause between both sets of approval emails and this way perhaps they can be treated distinctly and separately, then you can use the idea i shared regarding reviewing the names associated with approvals for other groups attached to the task that is being approved.