Multi Stage Approvals workflow
Hi all! I'm working on setting up a workflow for a training approval request in a HR service desk. My ideal workflow is employee creates request through portal. Request goes to employees group lead for initial approval. If group lead approves, it goes to the department lead for approval, if denied it goes back to the employee with comments or goes to a cancelled state. If department lead approves, it goes to HR for payment and logging. If DL denies, it either goes back to employee with comments or goes to cancelled state.
My current thoughts for how to implement this are
1. employee submits request.
2. Automation identifies employees team user group and applies appropriate team lead user group (single member) to approver field, transitions status to waiting for first approval. Notifies approver via slack.
2a. if denied, either transitions to cancelled or to initial status with request to initiating employee for more information.
2b. if approved, automation transitions to waiting for second approval.
3. Looks at initiating employees department user group and applies department lead user group to approver2 field. notifies approver2 over slack. (based on this https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-Service-Management/how-to-set-up-a-two-step-approval/qaq-p/113426 )
3a. if denied, either transitions to cancelled or to initial status with request to initiating employee for more information.
3b. if approved, moves to "approved, payment pending" status and notifies bursar over slack.
4. bursar moves to paid / complete
pie in the sky -
5. on date supplied for training course to actually complete, automation generates a task with a linked confluence page in a training project / space, and a request for a summary of the training from the initiating employee with a due date 2 weeks in the future and a slack notification.
Problems: I can't find much / any documentation on doing multi tiered approvals like this. If it's just not possible, I have two possible approaches I can see.
1. do a 2/2 approvals required step and send to both team lead and department lead at the same time, which I don't love.
2. have automation generate 2 subtasks that have approval steps, 1 for each, apply the right approver to each subtask, and have the main tasks workflow require that both of those issues be approved before it can move to payment pending. this can be more easily done in stages to ensure department leads don't get overwhelmed.
It really seems like there should be a more straightforward way to do this. Anybody tackled this before or have success / advice on a different workflow that makes more sense? I'm currently building the process and policy at the same time and have requirements but some flexibility if there are technical limitations.
Roguh draft of workflow in comments
3 answers
2 accepted
It worked! I wound up needing to create two custom fields, approval group 1 and approval group 2. I created federated groups for approvers of each team and department, controlled out of google workspace with the naming pattern of P.Dept.Team.Approver or P.Dept.Approver Long term, I'm hoping to add those fields to assets and have each employees team and department lead groups added so that this can be prefilled with employee asset automation, but for now the assignee chooses the employees team and dept approver groups. I did have to add a transition directly to dept lead, and I'll also need to eventually add one that goes directly to approved in the event of an exec entering a ticket, but it WORKS! The only defeat is that notifications don't seem to be sent out to the single group member when the group is assigned to the approval. As I expand this out to more teams, my hope is to eventually get it to the point where the only place team membership / role changes need to happen is google workspace, and then role and federated group based setup takes care of everything within Jira itself.
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