Too many conditions on your Workflows?

[williamsun]

Some customers like to over complicate processes.

By "some" I am actually being kind to consider a margin of error.

Always when I am in the process of adding a workflow to homogenize the handling of a "ticket" it starts off simple, then, more often than not, the customer starts down the path of "oh, but if this-and-that I would like such-and-such an exception...", and once you go down that rabbit hole, it just goes deeper and deeper.

I usually offer up a few solutions for this within Service-Now workflow design:

1. Several phases in one activity

If you have several consecutive phases that have the same responsible person, making one activity (approval or task) for each will bog down that user and make the tool seem very over-complicated.   Offer up one activity to cover all those steps/phases and add it on the description.

2. Manual Approvals

Service-Now workflows has a very useful tool called Manual Approvals.   This activity will make all approvals on the record, manual or automated, mandatory to move on.   This is particularly useful when the process does not have a definite list of approvers.

3. Conditions on Approvals

I recently discovered a neat trick after having too many if activities because "only get this approval if this condition is met, otherwise it's not needed".   The Approval activity actually has a condition builder that you can use to add this exclusion so that the flow bypasses this approval if the conditions are not met.

4. Separate Workflows

Sometimes, if it looks like one condition makes the workflow act completely different, it might mean that it requires a completely different workflow.   Make sure you make their conditions mutually exclusive and you can even have them use the same set of phases.

5. Avoid "hardcoded" approvals

Try, whenever possible, to use the record's user references when adding approvers.   Another way to do this would be to create a reference table where a specific function or role is tied to a user.   This will also help you in an organization that might have many moving pieces so as to avoid having to go through many workflows to make sure you changed an approver.

William