Possible To Have Approval Transitions Be Conditional?

[Tyler Rathbone]

We have an engineering approval process that essentially has approval tiers based on how much the idea costs.

Is there anyway to have an approval transition to the next approval status based on the value of a field? Ie. If a submitted ticket costs less than $500 it only needs 1 approval before going to execution, however if it costs more than $2000 it has 3 approval steps before going to execution

Is this something that can be done out of the box or will I just need to create intermediary statuses and apply automation to them?

[Beata Lewandowska]

Hi Tyler,
If you are open to using an app for approvals, many of them have conditions that you can apply for any approval (or even the approval step). In your case, I'd prepare an approval definition like this:

1. A person (or a group) who always has to approve, no matter the field's value.
2. A person (or a group) who approves only if the condition is met (field value >X).
3. A person (or a group) who approves only if the condition is met (field value > X).

To show the solution on an example - here I created a custom field for budget (with ID = 10070), so the condition looks like this: 

and the whole approval definition can be:

I hope it helps ;) The app I'm using is Approval Path for Jira, which allows approvals not only for JSM (you can check it out here ).

[Mikael Sandberg]

Yes, it is possible and you would do this using automation. Your workflow would have all approval statuses, and you can then use automation to bypass approval status based on the cost.

I created a similar approval workflow for our HR project for promotions and transfers. Based on what information not all 4 groups needed to approve, and I used automation to determine if a approval step should be bypassed or not.

[Mikael Sandberg]

You could do this based on a single approval status too. In that case the automation would figure out who should be added as approvers based on the cost, and then the approval step would have "all approvers need to approve" before the workflow moves the item to the next status.

[Tyler Rathbone]

So do this create a status without an approval step, and create an automation to add the appropriate approval groups based on the cost?

[Mikael Sandberg]

No, the status would still have the approval step on it, and then you use the automation that add the users that should approve based on the cost.

[Tim H_]

I used automation to determine if a approval step should be bypassed or not.

@Mikael Sandberg, can you show how you did this? Were you starting from one approval step when bypassing another? I'd like to automate an initial approval transition to be conditional on field values, but I can't figure out how to override the "Transition if approved" configured in my initial Approval.

[Mikael Sandberg]

Hi @Tim H_,

The way to do it is that the automation triggers on state transition, and in my case I checked if a specific approvers field was populated or not and if not then use the automation step that approves the transition. Unfortunately I cannot add a screenshot at the moment, so that is the best description I can give you.