Nudging Daily For No Obvious Reason

[Alan42]

We seem to have at least one request a day, across multiple workflows, that needs to be nudged to generate tasks after approval.   It's not a huge effort but it slows down fulfillment by hours or days and shouldn't be happening.   All the approvers have the business_stakeholder role.    After our go live we had some issues where nudge didn't work.  That was resolved by adding roles to be sure business_stakeholder had adequate permissions.     The roles in business_stakeholder are listed below.     Is something missing or should I be barking up a different tree?    

[jMarshal]

What do you do to "nudge" these workflows/requests that do not respond as expected?

Business Stakeholder licenses/access is quite limited and specific, I would guess that the workflow is trying to have "them" (not the actual user, but rather the user's account in the workflow context) do "something" to the REQ/RITM (or other associated record), for which they do not have access...but that "something" is the trigger for the next workflow step, which now needs a "nudge".

[Alan42]

I use the Nudge button in the Workflow Context that is linked to in the RITM.    

[jMarshal]

haha gotcha, thanks! ...I've never had to use that UI Action, myself. I thought you were using the word in a colloquial sense lol

From what I can tell, the "Nudge" (UI Action) is just attempting to reprocess the last workflow activity. The cause of the hang can be a lot of things and the fact that it hangs only for Business Stakeholder users, but always works after a "nudge" leads me to believe that your workflows have a step/activity which is attempting to run an action "as the business stakeholder", where they do not have access...and this is why the "nudge" works -- the user who does the nudge would be the user who runs the action in that sense, who would necessarily have "more access" than the Business Stakeholder user, as part of the condition on the ui action itself is "(gs.hasRole('admin'))".

I think access to your instance will be necessary to help you troubleshoot this further - you'll need to examine the details of the next steps after the workflow context(s) hang, to find a commonality, which explains this behaviour -- I'm sure it will be obvious, when you see it (as these things often are lol).

I'd recommend opening a ticket with Now Support (HI) for this, as they'll be able to securely access your instance and help t/s.

Here is some other information I found, which may help, if you do not want to engage Now Support yet:

> using a background script to do a "nudge" which is not the "nudge" you are referring to: Flow stuck in "Waiting" for an approval that has already been approved - Support and Troubleshootin...

> using the "nudge" ui action...but this includes some hypothetical underlying causes that you could refer to, as your desire seems to be fixing the root cause and not using nudge: How to progress a stuck workflow - Support and Troubleshooting (servicenow.com)

> again, this article is more about using nudge...but also seems to talk about updating the context record with a specific sys_user id, which may help you determine root cause (you'll likely see those records with the id of a business stakeholder, which may point you to the action which needs adjusting). This article was a bit difficult to understand IMO...but worth a shot: Workflow stuck and nudge does not progress. - Support and Troubleshooting (servicenow.com)