Confused about Change Management when a status has mulitple approval directions

[Ste404]

Hi there,

I have a 'Peer Review' step in a change management workflow, it is an approval step.

My issue (and this happens a few times in the workflow) is that based on Change Risk there are different places it can go.

I.e. if the change type is normal and the risk is Low the approval will go to Awaiting Implementation.  If the change type is normal and the risk is High the approval will go to Planning.

When you set up the approval step in the workflow you need to give it the action to take for approve or decline, but in this instance it can go two ways.

How can I have approval steps that can fork in 2 or 3 directions based on other fields on the form seeing I can set that up in the 'Edit' of the approval step.

ta

[Dirk Ronsmans]

Hey @Ste404 ,

The short answer is, you can't fork a decision process from a single approval step based on conditions.

The long(er) answer would be, we can work around that limitation :)

In my mind we can use 2 different approaches for this.

1. Use an intermediate status. You can approve the Change which will transition to the intermediate status and then use an automation to make the change flow to the correct status. This in between status will not be used for anything except to have something where the Change can "pause" for a few moments while the Automation runs. I would suggest then to make sure to block the transition from this in between status that i can only be done by the Automation rule/user
2. Similar to what I suggest in 1. but without the extra status. You can make the Change go to your "longest" path at all times so this would be Planning then. Once in planning you can also let an automation run that transitions to "Awaiting Implementation" immediately as you don't need the planning. For this one I'm assuming the Change would transition from Planning to Awaiting Implementation anyway.

Both would work imho, it just requires some automation and both need that intermediate stop that either moves forward automatically or holds.