Approval Workflow based upon Manager's Title

Question

We would like for approvals to keep going up the chain of command until it reaches someone with a certain title. For example, Let's say our organization has the following hierarchy:

Sr VP

VP

Director

Manager

Regular Employee

We need all tickets to be approved by a director. So, if a regular employee submits a ticket it would go through two approvals (Manager and Director). But, if a manager submits a ticket, it would only be approved by one level (Director).

If the Director themselves submit a ticket, then it would just go up a single level to their manager (VP)... but that part I know is easy to set up.

Titles across our organization are pretty clean so looking pulling their title and looking for the term "Director" is possible (just not sure if Jira workflow is capable of doing that)

Is this possible?

Thomas Deiler_db00h3 · Answer

@Ivan Tovbin, writing my answer took me a little bit longer - sorry haven't seen yours.

Thomas Deiler_db00h3 · Answer

Dear @Ramsay Zaki,

little tricky but try following:  you will need the Workflow PowerBox plugin and the Suite Utilities for Jira (JSU):

* create for each of your hierarchies an own group.
* assignee the people to those groups
* create a new workflow (for testing) with status open -> waiting for approval -> approved.
* in status 'waiting for approval' you create one transition per hierarchy level that leads to approved.
* each transition gets two extra conditions:

Example transitions to approve an issue of Manager by Director:

condition 1 = user in group (Directors) with Suite Utils

condition 2 = "Allow the Reporter's manager to execute a transition" (WF Powerbox)

Same with the other constellations. This combination will only show one transition as long as one user is only in one of the created groups.

So long

Thomas

Ivan Tovbin · Answer

Hi Ramsay,

This will require a rather complex workflow with multiple approval statuses, transitions and conditions, but it's totally possible.

First things first though. To make this all work you'll have to somehow tell Jira the title of the reporter. The obvious way to do it, is to create a custom field, which will be populated by the reporter's title and then use the value of this field to set your workflow conditions to determine the correct approval route. A not so obvious way to do it is to utilise user properties.

Now that we have that out of the way, comes the tricky part - the workflow. I'm gonna give you a general idea and if you need help with specific details, then let us know.

You need to create multiple approval statuses, one for each hierarchy level, except the top one (I assume Senior VP doesn't need anyone to authorize his requests, right?). Then create multiple transitions for those statuses and utilise conditions based on your custom field value to make those transitions usable and vice versa.

For example let's say your workflow looks like this:

'Open' -> 'Approval 1' -> 'Approval 2' -> 'Approval 3' -> 'Approved'

If the reporter is a 'Reqular employee', then he'll go throgh all statuses in succession. However if the reporter is a 'Director' then you'll have to create a transition that leads from 'Open' straight to 'Approval 3' and set it's condition to only show up when your custom field has 'Director' value. Also you'll need to set the conditions on transitions leading to 'Approval 1' and 'Approval 2' to be displayed only for 'Regular employees' and hidden for everyone else.

I hope that makes sense. :)