approvals for users on vacation

[Ravish Shetty]

users who are on vacation do not setup delegates. how do we secure approvals for them when they are on vacation? i am looking for best practices for this known process related issue.

[Moy1]

As a general practice, all approvals should be sent to groups with atleast 2 members in them. If the users do not setup delegate when they are on vacation, the only possibility is to let the system admin approve on their behalf adding a comment about what they are doing. This approach is not recommended and certainly not best practice.

You can also setup the system to trigger approval request to the user's manager but this would require system wide change depending on how it is setup.

[David OBrien · Accepted solution]

You could grant the approver's manager access to approve on their behalf. We've done that up 3 levels of managers to counter this exact situation.  Then we created a service portal widget to show 'indirect' approvals (i.e. the approvals that the logged in user has access to approve, but that are not assigned to them).  And because we have a lot of approvals that are done via email, I created a UI action accessible to itil users that sends an approval email to the approver's manager so they can approve via email instead.

[Roland Mussel]

Hi Colleagues, i am a little concerned cause a Manager, sure could approve from Finance point of view. But as a systemlead, or change responsible for GxP environments it makes no sense and Legally you could get here in trouble with the FDA.

So i miss a matrix in the backend which could maintained based on roles and approval type to root delegations and escalations based on this. e.g. only somebody with Change Approval Role could do this. I think we have to customize this but normally this must be the right way.

I think this concept would be beneficial for all platforms where you have to handle different approval types.