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orkflow design best practice questions..

MLee7404

Hello.

I was hoping to get some best practice suggestions from those in the forum
regarding certain elements of workflow design.

I appreciate your time reading it and providing answers.

WORKFLOW APPROVALS
1)We have a lot of legal, and approvals who need to review via workflow. Do you suggest that these approvals happen concurrently or in sequence? Any pros and cons to either?

ADDING A PUBLISH DUE DATE TO THE WORKFLOW
2)My group wants to have an actual publish date dropdown in the actual workflow assignment? The reason is to put a due date so we can send reminders to the people who have it in their cue.

I felt it would interfere w/the natural listing by date of workflow's assigned in your workflow cue, because the publish date would supercede that. My suggestion was to have all dates put in the comment field. The suggestion by others is that it won't be trackable that way(in the comments). Any thoughts?

WORKFLOW TERMS
3)I wanted to get others feelings on terms for teamsite workflow terms.
My new place has their own terms and wanted to see what other's best practices were for these terms.

Workflow Owner = The person who initiates the workflow and starts it(at my previous office..this was referred to as the author). The WF owner sends it to an authoer.

Workflow Author = the Author is assigned the task and makes changes(this is what I used to refer as the editor)

Workflow Editor = The Editor is an actual editorial person at this company who will review what was changed and also has write access

Workflow Approver = These assignees have read only access and can only approve changes.

Is this the norm for those in the industry or is this unique to this company?
My previous terms from my other company are in brackets(which I thought was industry standard).r

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Phanie

WORKFLOW APPROVALS
1)We have a lot of legal, and approvals who need to review via workflow. Do you suggest that these approvals happen concurrently or in sequence? Any pros and cons to either?

A: Workflows are designed in most of the cases based on business rules. So based on this concurrent or sequence approvals would be decided. with concurrent approvals you must be clear which task would be the successor if any one of the approvals reject the task.

ADDING A PUBLISH DUE DATE TO THE WORKFLOW
2)My group wants to have an actual publish date dropdown in the actual workflow assignment? The reason is to put a due date so we can send reminders to the people who have it in their cue.

I felt it would interfere w/the natural listing by date of workflow's assigned in your workflow cue, because the publish date would supercede that. My suggestion was to have all dates put in the comment field. The suggestion by others is that it won't be trackable that way(in the comments). Any thoughts?
A: Umm here if you are planning to have the comment field feature and you want the date in tht field .. how does it differ from having an separate dropdown .. in either cases you are looking at having the Publish date.

WORKFLOW TERMS
3)I wanted to get others feelings on terms for teamsite workflow terms.
My new place has their own terms and wanted to see what other's best practices were for these terms.

Workflow Owner = The person who initiates the workflow and starts it(at my previous office..this was referred to as the author). The WF owner sends it to an authoer.

Workflow Author = the Author is assigned the task and makes changes(this is what I used to refer as the editor)

Workflow Editor = The Editor is an actual editorial person at this company who will review what was changed and also has write access

Workflow Approver = These assignees have read only access and can only approve changes.

Is this the norm for those in the industry or is this unique to this company?
My previous terms from my other company are in brackets(which I thought was industry standard).
A: I am with the your present company naming standards. Those are the much familiar and understandable ones and most of the companies follow the same naming standards (few organisations have there own)

--
Phanie

MLee7404

WORKFLOW APPROVALS
1)We have a lot of legal, and approvals who need to review via workflow. Do you suggest that these approvals happen concurrently or in sequence? Any pros and cons to either?

A: Workflows are designed in most of the cases based on business rules. So based on this concurrent or sequence approvals would be decided. with concurrent approvals you must be clear which task would be the successor if any one of the approvals reject the task.

ADDING A PUBLISH DUE DATE TO THE WORKFLOW
2)My group wants to have an actual publish date dropdown in the actual workflow assignment? The reason is to put a due date so we can send reminders to the people who have it in their cue.

I felt it would interfere w/the natural listing by date of workflow's assigned in your workflow cue, because the publish date would supercede that. My suggestion was to have all dates put in the comment field. The suggestion by others is that it won't be trackable that way(in the comments). Any thoughts?
A: Umm here if you are planning to have the comment field feature and you want the date in tht field .. how does it differ from having an separate dropdown .. in either cases you are looking at having the Publish date.

The separate dropdown will hold a value that you can create metrics for and track. If we put the publish date as part of the comments, it will be harder to track. that's what I'm trying to solve for

WORKFLOW TERMS
3)I wanted to get others feelings on terms for teamsite workflow terms.
My new place has their own terms and wanted to see what other's best practices were for these terms.

Workflow Owner = The person who initiates the workflow and starts it(at my previous office..this was referred to as the author). The WF owner sends it to an authoer.

Workflow Author = the Author is assigned the task and makes changes(this is what I used to refer as the editor)

Workflow Editor = The Editor is an actual editorial person at this company who will review what was changed and also has write access

Workflow Approver = These assignees have read only access and can only approve changes.

Is this the norm for those in the industry or is this unique to this company?
My previous terms from my other company are in brackets(which I thought was industry standard).
A: I am with the your present company naming standards. Those are the much familiar and understandable ones and most of the companies follow the same naming standards (few organisations have there own)

--
Phanie

A: Umm here if you are planning to have the comment field feature and you want the date in tht field .. how does it differ from having an separate dropdown .. in either cases you are looking at having the Publish date.

The separate dropdown will hold a value that you can create metrics for and track. If we put the publish date as part of the comments, it will be harder to track. that's what I'm trying to solve for

Thanks for your response!

Phanie

A: Umm here if you are planning to have the comment field feature and you want the date in tht field .. how does it differ from having an separate dropdown .. in either cases you are looking at having the Publish date.

The separate dropdown will hold a value that you can create metrics for and track. If we put the publish date as part of the comments, it will be harder to track. that's what I'm trying to solve for
Thanks for your response!

If that is the case opting for dropdown is a good idea but rest I would say lets wait for some experts opinion here Smiley Happy

.

--
Phanie

Adam Stoller

WORKFLOW APPROVALS
1)We have a lot of legal, and approvals who need to review via workflow. Do you suggest that these approvals happen concurrently or in sequence? Any pros and cons to either?

Personally, I prefer serial processes because they're less confusing. In a concurrent review process you could have 50 people receive email notification for 10 review tasks - one person picks up one of those tasks and rejects it - and you now have 49 people with email sitting in their mailbox which if they try to click on it - will receive an error message about the task no longer being valid.

True, with a serial process you still have the same issue with each individual grouptask, but it's usually a smaller number of people who may be affected and often, they communicate with each other through other means and know not to worry about a task which has already been picked up.

Go further in - sticking with the 10 concurrent tasks - say each one has been claimed - but one person rejects the work while others are still reviewing - they get an error message when they try to transition their task (regardless of whether it was for approval or rejection) - and you also have more issues if the grouptasks do not retain ownership - so that a reviewer might be working on a task they've taken, and meantime it's since been rejected and re-submitted for review - now the reviewer tries to transition the task and it fails because they're no longer the owner of the task.

Serial is also generally easier to implement IMO.

ADDING A PUBLISH DUE DATE TO THE WORKFLOW
2)My group wants to have an actual publish date dropdown in the actual workflow assignment? The reason is to put a due date so we can send reminders to the people who have it in their cue.

I felt it would interfere w/the natural listing by date of workflow's assigned in your workflow cue, because the publish date would supercede that. My suggestion was to have all dates put in the comment field. The suggestion by others is that it won't be trackable that way(in the comments). Any thoughts?

I use a publish date in the workflow I'm currently developing - in this case I use delta between the current date and the publish date to set the priority - and it gets adjusted dynamically everytime someone claims a review task (grouptask). Whether or not it will actually make any difference in the way they do their work remains to be seen.

I think having it as a separate item, either as metadata on the asset or a field in the job instantiation form allows for it to be tracked for auditing purposes - far better than having it burried within a comment.

WORKFLOW TERMS
3)I wanted to get others feelings on terms for teamsite workflow terms.
My new place has their own terms and wanted to see what other's best practices were for these terms.

Workflow Owner = The person who initiates the workflow and starts it(at my previous office..this was referred to as the author). The WF owner sends it to an authoer.

Workflow Author = the Author is assigned the task and makes changes(this is what I used to refer as the editor)

Workflow Editor = The Editor is an actual editorial person at this company who will review what was changed and also has write access

Workflow Approver = These assignees have read only access and can only approve changes.

Is this the norm for those in the industry or is this unique to this company?
My previous terms from my other company are in brackets(which I thought was industry standard).r

The problem with the terms and definitions, especially the first one, is that you seem to assume that they are mutually exclusive of one another.

The owner of a job could be an author, an editor, a project manager, pretty much anyone except perhaps a reviewer.

An author is generally the initial content creator. They may also be responsible for making modifications to existing content. An author could initiate a workflow either on their own volition or after having been assigned work outside the context of the workflow.

An editor generally doesn't do initial content creation (unless they also wear an author hat on some days), they generally perform first-level reviewing of content with the ability to make modifications (generally just tweaks - major changes would be sent back to the author). The editor may be responsible for making modifications to existing content. An editor could initiate a workflow and assign work to an author.

The term "approver" should be thrown out - it is the stupidist term and I always complained about it being in the documentation. The correct term is "reviewer" - "approving" is one of at least two actions that they can perform (the other being rejection) - a reviewer is generally not responsible for maing editiorial changes to content