Workflow

Over the past few months, we’ve explored eleven best practices to make your Vista Workflows more effective. Each was a simple task addressing a common issue that clients have encountered in their workflow implementations. These ranged from tips on constructing/designing the overall flow, to implementing specific flow steps, to settings and actions taken outside of…

In an earlier article, we discussed tailoring workflow participant screens to hide, enable, or highlight information to make it more relevant and useful. The same logic applies to your workflow notification emails—e.g., when an employee gets an email from the workflow engine that they have an approval action sitting in their queue. Instead of forcing…

In an earlier article we discussed properly modeling your flows to mirror how you actually conduct business (as opposed to your ideal business practices). But, you can take this concept too far—adding numerous steps, branches, and loops—to cover every possible scenario that might exist. As a result, your flows become too complicated and hard to…

This might seem like more of “programmer-oriented” article, but in a way, creating flow templates is a little like programming. You must model your business practice to make sure that the flow does what it is supposed to do. As such, you must make sure that if you diagrammed your flow, all the steps not…

In the last article we talked about modeling your actual business practices, not your hoped-for business practices. As part of that, we reviewed the situation with a real organization who tried to model their desired leave request process instead of their actual one. Their expected process was that all leave requests required manager approval before…

The first step in creating workflow templates for your various HCM activities is to model those processes. The Vista Workflow engine supports just about any variations in business flows, so you can model just about whatever you want. One trap people fall into is modeling what they think ought to be, instead of what actually…

By default, the information submitted on a Vista workflow screen is both visible and editable (with the standard workflow audit trail) by subsequent workflow participants (e.g., approvers). That might be appropriate in some situations, but not all. For example, you might want a manager to be able to approve or reject something, but not to…

In the last article, we discussed running the Issue Detective so that it can alert you to workflow templates that might cause approvals to land on in the queue of someone who is no longer there. However, somebody might be terminated (or transferred) while existing flow approvals are in progress. If one of these is…