Arbor Workflows: Adding a Decision

Decisions are available to MIS users on a Comms and Perform Tier at School-Level.

What is a Decision?

A decision can be used as a step in a workflow to ask for approval for something or confirmation that something has been done. The recipient will be provided with the option to either approve or reject the request.

It is important to understand the outcomes of these decisions. Rejecting a decision will halt the workflow, with no further steps triggered. Any updates that are triggered when a decision is rejected will still run.

One example would be that a leave request may be sent to a line manager or business manager to ask for approval for a period of leave. The recipient will be provided with the relevant information and will be given the option to approve or reject the request.

Remember

Approving the request will result in the next step being triggered.

Rejecting this decision will halt the workflow.

How do we add a decision to a workflow?

Adding a decision to your workflow is super simple. Here a video to review the process, the steps are broken down below:

Setting up a decision step with reminders

Upon clicking on the green + symbol, you are able to select from a range of options, as pictured below. To add a decision step, you are going to select Decision from the options provided.

Upon selecting Decision you will complete the required information:

• The subject of the decision (it is best to keep this brief), e.g., Leave Request
• Who is the individual making the decision

In the example below, you can see that we are asking the School Business Manager to authorise a leave request. Instead of typing the names of the decision makers, we are tagging these individuals from the roles. This is really important as it ensures that all of the steps integrate with one another properly.

If you’d like to learn more about what a tag is and find out how to add tags, check out our handy knowledge bank article Adding a Tag

Once you have added a title and a decision maker, you can then use the Instructions button to add some additional context to your request. This information will be visible to the user when they open the decision. 

Constructing your decision

Once you have added a title and decision maker, you will be able to begin constructing your decision.

Within the instructions box, you can craft instructions that will be presented to the decision maker when they make their decision. It is integral, therefore, that the approver has all of the required information in order to make their decision.

You can also add instructions to the decision 'task' itself. In our example, you can see that we are providing the Business Manager with some additional context as to who is requesting annual leave, along with the period of time that they require.

All of these pieces of information have been gathered elsewhere in the workflow, so we are referring back to them using tags. Adding a Tag

Additional settings and features

Once you have added your instructions, there are some other useful features you may want to include:

• Add a due date to the request. Simply click on the button next to the heading Due and set an amount of time that you would like for this request to be completed.

   

• Add any relevant documents. You can do this by clicking on the Attachment button and tagging or uploading a PDF document, which may be referred to as part of the decision.

Adding Rules to decisions

You may want to add 'Rules' to your decision step when certain conditions are met. For example, you might want to auto-approve any decision apart from the Line Manager if cover is not required. 

Alternatively, you may want to set a specific decision maker dependent on the person making a request. 

By selecting the 'Add New Rule' button you can configure these. 

Once selected you will be presented with options of what you would like the rule to do. 

Rules can be used to Auto-approve when certain conditions are true, Auto-reject when certain conditions are true, Set Decision Maker for the decision is there is not one decision maker for all possibilities relevant to this decision and Skip the decision when certain conditions are met. 

Lets take a look at each of these.

Auto-Approve:

Once you select Auto-Approve you will be promotes if you want this rule to 'Do right away' or 'Wait a while'. Depending on your process, you may not want this to auto approve and more to the sent step straight away. This is when you would select 'wait a while' and be prompted to add the duration of the wait.

For this example we are going to use 'do right away' and then select the 'add condition' button so we can begin to add the condition in which the rule will operate against.

From here we configure the condition, which is a behaviour, for the rule to use. The easiest way to think of this is by using the approach of 'if this happens / is true, then, do this'.  

Clicking into the bar under 'IF' will open the tag selector to begin to craft this condition from the information within your workflow up until this step. 

For this example of planned absence, we want to get the condition to auto approve this decision for School MAT staff as these requests go another decision maker, who in our example will be the decision maker at the next step. If this wasn't the case it would also be appropriate to use the 'Set Decision Maker' option. 

Once you are happy with the condition, select 'Save Condition'. This will collapse the view. 

From here you can set other conditions that apply to that same rule or 'Save Rule' to finalise the process. This will again collapse the view and from here you can continue to add rules as needed.

We are now going to add another type of rule.

Auto-Reject:

This process for adding an Auto-Reject mirror that of Auto-Approve above. By Selecting the Auto-Reject option you will be prompted again about the delay option. 

Set Decision Maker:

By selecting the 'Set Decision Maker' option within rules you are able to route the decision to different recipients based on conditions you set. These conditions are built from information that appears prior to this step in the workflow. This may be information collection as part of a form or be about the workflow in entirety such as the school within a group it is running for. 

A popular use case for this option is if different departments within your organisation require different approver. These departments would be need to collected as part of your workflow but can then be used in the 'conditions' to control the route of this decision. 

The first 'If this, then this' stages remain true for this condition.

As this rule is routing who will make this decision there is the added task to state who it should be routed to. 

Clicking into the 'who should make the decision' bar will open the tag selector. From here Arbor Roles and Custom Roles will be available to select from or the 'T' allows for manual entry of an email address. 

Once selected this will appear in the bar and the rule can be saved.

This will collapse the view and you will see the rule within the list, if you have multiple.

Rules work from a 'top down' approach meaning the first rule that is met will steer the workflow direction. You can rearrange the order of rules by clicking and dragging them. 

If no rules can be met than the decision will always be sent to the decision maker by default that is attached to the decision at the top of the step. In this example that would be our 'People Operations' role.

What about updates?

Should you choose to, you also have the option to use the more... tab to add updates to this step.

These are additional steps which will be triggered, depending on which decision is made by the approver.

If you’d like to add updates or reminders to your decision, This video will show you how and you can use our helpful article What is an Update? to find out more about this.

Setting up a Decision step with reminders