Hello to all:
I am having trouble understanding how the Department Approvals work. It takes sooooo long to set them up but I'm assuming I'm doing it wrong.
In my mind, I could set up a department approval for a particular type of ticket, like New Hire, and that approval would see the department chosen for the ticket and would send the approval to the appropriate person. I would like to think it should work this way but I can't figure that out. To make it work here, then, I have been creating approval process for each department for each type of ticket (what a chore!).
So let me run through my set up so you can understand what I've been doing and then, if there is in fact an easier way, you can clue me in....
I created Department Approver Roles (one for each department). Then, under Department Approvers, I created an entry for each department and assigned it an approver role (Marketing would be the department and I assigned a Marketing Manager as the Approver Role for example). Then, to complete the setup, I created an Approval Process for each department. To make it work, I have action rules (one for each department...AGAIN). They all are monitoring ticket changes and when they find a request type of "New Hire" and see their department, they attach the approval process to the ticket for that department.
This is frustrating because I have created each department (more than ten of them) for approver roles, department approvers, approval processes, and then still had to create an action rule for each. That was all done for the "New Hire" process. Now I need to create this same type of setup for an access request for a particular software application our clients are using. Do I really have to set up all ten or so departments four or five times? Ugh.
I'd like to think that you could have a list of approvers, in one group somewhere and tell the ticket to assign that SINGLE approval process and then, that one process, would see the department chosen in the ticket and would assign the appropriate approval process. Please tell me there is a way to do this.
I know, under Department Approvers, you can add more than one Approver Role but I'm assuming that's if you wanted to assign more than one person per department so that won't help. On the approval process, if I changed one of my processes from "Marketing" to "New Hire", I know that under approval steps I can add multiple steps. I tried that first, and added a step for each department, but when the ticket tried to update, I got an error message stating, I think, that the approval didn't match the department or maybe it said the department couldn't be found. Sorry, I can't remember specifically what that message was - that was last week when I tested that way.
Any information you can provide will be greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
Magus