Approval process for an item, if user can be a company director and althoug common employee

[lubomirnovak]

Hi experts, is there any option to set up 1 step approval for item in general, if as attendee can be a company director without supervisor and although common employee? thanks a lot.

Lubomir

[MaryKatherineJ]

@lubomirnovak, yes, it is possible to set up a 1-step approval process for an item, and there are several options for how to make the approval process work.  

The first step to create an Approval Process is to confirm that the appropriate Approval Role is available (Learning Admin > References > System Admin > Approval Roles). The Learning application comes with 5 pre-configured Approval Roles (copied from Help menu):

• Employee: The employee himself or herself. You might have an approval process for the employees to acknowledge enrollment requests before they are forwarded to managers.
• Manager Level 1: The person in this role is always the employees' immediate manager.
• Manager Level 2: The person in this role is the second level manager (the employees' managers' manager).
• Instructor: This is for the E-signature Process only. We do not expect that the approval will be sent to the instructor upon registration.
• HRBP: A Human Resources Business Partner (HRBP) to share some of the managerial responsibilities with a manager.

If you want your 1-step approval process to use one of these 5 approval roles, then you would create your Approval Process (References > System Admin > Approval Process), create one Step, and then add the desired pre-configured Approval Role to the new Step. The benefit of using one of the 5 pre-configured Approval Roles in your Approval Process is that the system dynamically determines who the approver should be based on the employee's manager reporting hierarchy. There is no additional configuration required beyond adding the Approval Process to your item or class.

It sounds as if your issue, though, is how to create an Approval Process that will work for someone who does not have a Manager.  If you have captured HRBP information for your users (i.e. listed HRBPs as Alternate Managers for your users), you can try creating an Approval Process using that Approval Role.  But if none of the 5 pre-configured Approval Roles solve your issue, then you might want to consider a custom Approval Process instead.

A custom Approval Process allows a specifically designated user (or someone in a designated group of users) to be the Approver, without regard to the employee's manager reporting hierarchy. The process to create a 1-step custom Approval Process is similar to what I described above, but when you create your one Step, you must either add one or more users to be the approvers for this process or create a custom Approval Role and then add the Approval Role to the step (you can technically do both). Which option should you use?

• If it is acceptable that all approval requests to go to the same one or more approvers regardless of the employee entering the request, then you can just add the user IDs of the approvers to the approval process directly. All approvers in the list will be notified of the approval request, and any one of them can approve the request.
• But if you need to route employee approval requests to different approvers based on the security domain or organization of the requester, then you will need to create a custom Approval Role instead. Once you create the custom Approval Role and link it to the Approval Process, you must then go to the User > Approval Roles menu for each person you want to be an approver, add the Approval Role to them, and then specify the Control Security Domain or Control Organization for which the approver will responsible. The user Domain or Organization values specified here will allow only approval requests from users in the specified Domains/Organizations to be routed to this approver. When using this strategy, you should ensure that all users in the target audience have an approver covering their domain/organization.

One last thing to consider if you decide to create a custom Approval Process is maintenance of approvers. The list of approvers assigned to a custom Approval Process and the list of users who have a custom Approval Role assigned must be managed manually by a Learning Administrator. There is currently no function to assign an Approval Role by an assignment profile. Therefore, you should consider how your list of approvers will be maintained over time as people come and go.

Good luck,
Mary Katherine Johnson