Owners and ownership groups

[Jo_Dunne]

Can I ask how other people are using owners and ownership groups within your approve / retire workflows? 

We have enabled ownership groups, so our workflow goes from author to all ownership group members to approve (I think this is standard OOTB), but what we are finding is that group members are getting so many notifications that they are being ignored. 

I wanted to ask if there is anyway to set the workflow to go to the identified owner in the first instance and ONLY go to the ownership group if there is no response from the owner? 

Interested in whether other people are facing a similar challenge and what you have done to overcome it.

Thanks 

[Aerin]

I asked my team devs about this and they said that the Knowledge module isn't "task based" the way that most of the others are. Because of this, it would require a fairly high level of customization to implement the ability to assign work to specific people, rather than just the ownership group. We try to avoid that level of customization, so we are making do. If anyone has information otherwise, I'd be interested to hear it!

[Pam Calvey]

We have set up a dashboard with reports that show "Articles for Approval by Doc Owner" and that is working out better than the generic "My approvals" box. They click through to the articles for which they are responsible. 

[Jo_Dunne]

Thanks that's good to know.

I wonder if there is a way that authoring can be opened up to the content owner group, this might help? We have 1 person named as author, 1 as content owner and then a group of people in the content owner group - so approvals bottleneck with the content ownership group, but as soon as an article is returned to draft, we get another bottleneck with the single person dependency on the author. 

[Dipesh Kalantri]

Hi @Jo_Dunne 

In our case, we have service catalog and for every service we have defined ownership groups. 

For each article once service is selected approval goes to that service specific ownership group and ownership group is responsible for that artilce life cycle including approvals/changes/ retirement etc and dependnecy with just Author is removed. 

We have defined automated mails for approval reminders and also defined workflows that if approvals are not done for given period then article will move back to draft. 

We have built dashboards for ownweship groups where they can select their group and check overall health of their kb articles. (Draft/Review/Retired/rating/feedback etc) 

Apart from above we conduct monthly review meetings with top groups having maximum count of kb articles and it serves as kind of short training session and also we are able to do stakeholder management .

There is improvement over time and we are fine by the rate of it as it is consistent. 

Regarding going to one specific owner, I believe in this way, importance of ownership group and the purpose it gets reduced and one more layer of individual dependnecy will get added. (Consider the owner left company or joined other department etc) 

Hope this helps. 

Good luck. 

Regards, 

Dipesh