Number of approvals by assingment group

Andrew Jahns · ‎02-23-2017

Hopefully a easy question for others... All I am looking to do is figure out a way in the Reporting module to capture the number of approvals are done by day, week, month, etc. by a specific workgroup. I have tried using the Change, Change Metric, Group Approval, Approval tables to figure this out, but I am at a loss.

Mark Stanger · ‎02-23-2017

The only place the system will store this is in the 'Group Approval' table. Although graphical workflow allows you to add groups to 'User approval' activities, these just get added as individual users when they're actually included as approvers so you need to make sure anything you want to report on this way is added as a 'Group Approval' workflow activity...or at least added to the 'Group Approval' table.

Once you've got records in the table and you can access it in the reporting interface, you should be able to create any time series chart on the 'Group Approval' table. You can group by 'Assignment group' and then trend by 'Updated' per week and aggregate by count. You'll also want to set a Condition filter to only show those records where the 'Approval' value is 'Approved' or 'Rejected' so that you're not seeing those things that the group didn't actually take action on. Here's a screenshot showing a sample setup.

Andrew Jahns · ‎02-23-2017

Hi Mark! This is similar to what I have been trying, but to me, it is not correct. I believe this is the total number of Change Requests that Assignment Groups have approved. Let me explain. For many Change Requests, they are approved by the same group multiple times for numerous reasons such as business delay, etc. In other words, it moves back to draft and all assignment groups have to approve again. (To make life more complicated, the Assignment Groups could change during the life of the Change Request but let us not go there... yet...) Therefore, this could mean the same Change Request was approved two times last week, and 3 times this week by an Assignment Group. Heck, it could have been approved twice last month and 4 times the month before. This is the essence of what I am trying to capture. All of the approvals done by an Assignment Group (i.e. workgroup). So when I use the Group Approval table set up like yours and use a specific Change Request, my hope would be to show all of the times it was approved by the different Assignment Groups. Unfortunately, it just shows the quantity 5 approvals - which I believe is the total number of assignment groups' last group approvals. I chose this specific Change Request because I know for a fact by looking at the Activity Log it was approved by one Assignment Group a total of 5 times. I attached some screenshots. 1) It is not "Grouped By" and shows the total number of final approvals by all of the Assignment Groups. In this case, it is five. 2) It is "Grouped By" and shows all of the Assignment Groups below, with their final approval. 3) I added a filter of one of the Assignment Groups to show this view also.

To be honest, when you stated "Although graphical workflow allows you to add groups to 'User approval' activities, these just get added as individual users when they're actually included as approvers so you need to make sure anything you want to report on this way is added as a 'Group Approval' workflow activity", I am not exactly sure what that means. Perhaps that is the issue...

Thanks

Mark Stanger · ‎02-24-2017

Can you check a couple of things for me?

1) Navigate to the 'sysapproval_group' table and filter for records where the 'Parent' is the change request you're interested in. Do you see the expected number of group approval records?

2) Look at the workflow attached to that change request. You can usually do this by clicking the 'Show workflow' related link from the change record. When these groups are added as approvers, are they added with an 'Approval - Group' workflow activity or an 'Approval - User' activity? If you've got a mix of these in your workflow you may need to monitor the 'sysapproval_group' table for changes with a test change request and see what gets generated.

If this is generating the information correctly to produce the desired reporting output you should have a new 'sysapproval_group' record created each and every time a group is requested to approve...even on rollbacks and re-approvals.

Andrew Jahns · ‎02-24-2017

Hi Mark! I appreciate your thoughts and expertise.

1) When I did "Navigate to the 'sysapproval_group' table and filter for records where the 'Parent' is the change request you're interested in. Do you see the expected number of group approval records?", Just to confirm — do not dot walk to Parent.Number like I did in 1.jpg, just Parent. I still get the 5 Assignment Groups. See see 4.jpg.

2) When you state, "Look at the workflow attached to that change request. You can usually do this by clicking the 'Show workflow' related link from the change record." I do not see 'Show workflow' related link anywhere.