Edit change approvers

[nate_weldon1]

Has anyone come up with a way to edit a list of change approvers on the fly? We have situations where some changes may not be able to have a pre-specified list of approvers based on various business conditions that would be overly complex to put in a workflow. it would be nice to have the edit button present on the related list of approvers for a change, but wondering if anyone has come across this and how they got past it.

Thanks,

Nate Weldon

[Mark Stanger]

We do this in our turnkey Change management solution. We have a 'Manual approvers' activity inserted in our workflow that checks for any approvals inserted manually through the related list on the change form. Manual approvals can be added during the 'Pending' change state before approval is requested. If it is discovered that manual approvals are needed after initial approval request, then the user has the ability to roll back the change to a pending state, add the manual approvers, and re-request approval. This gives us the flexibility to handle virtually any change approval scenario and makes for a nice workflow as well. Let me know if you'd like a demo.

[Baggies]

Hi Mark,
I have been doing some reading on this, as we have an issue with manually adding approvers to Catalog Items. From past experience, it has always been a two-step process - manually add the Approver (approval defaults to 'Not Requested'). and then you have to right click, and Request Approval. The workflow seems to get stuck if you don't do the second step. It seems to stick on our 'Check for manually approvers' activity. Is this a common issue, or is it just the way SNC works?


This is a excerpt from the wiki :

3.3 Generating Approvals using the Approvers Related List
It is also possible to manually add approvers to a request. Additional approvers can be added by clicking the "Edit" button in the Approvers section near the bottom of a request.
When an approver is added manually, the status for that approver defaults to "Not Requested". When the status of the approver is changed to "Requested", the approver will be sent an email requesting approval action.

[Mark Stanger]

I think the problem you're seeing is that you're not adding the manual approvers before the corresponding workflow activity is reached. Whenever I set this up, I make sure that manual approvals are all added before the manual approvals activity is reached in the workflow. I've never seen any issues with it working that way.

[Baggies]

The workflow has a task set for the service desk to manually add Approvers if approval is required. If Approval is not required, they close the task. The next actvity after this task is the "Check for manually added approvers" activity. I have attached 2 screenshots of the workflow, see how the "Close Task" task gets hung up if the Approval is not set to requested and the user attempts to close the task?
The workaround of course is to do the second step and request approval. I may give James a call too as other users have created a business rule to chnage the approval status. Thanks, Mark.