A few months ago, a fellow workflow developer asked for my opinion on a workflow enhancement request he had received. He was more of a technical than a functional person, but even so he understood the business well enough to have serious doubts whether the request really made good business sense. This is the scenario he presented.

The business had implemented a workflow scenario that called for an approval task to be automatically sent to first-level management, i.e., the direct line manager of the employee who had started the workflow. The escalation procedures for the workflow were: If the manager does not complete the approval in the required time, after three days the approval task is automatically redirected to senior management, i.e., the manager’s manager. The work would then sit in the senior manager’s inbox until action is taken. No escalation strategy is applied to how long the work sits in the senior manager’s inbox.

The workflow had been running for a few months, and some of the first-level managers were frequently failing to process the approvals within the preset deadline. There could be a number of reasons for this:

• The managers are ignoring the deadline. It’s unlikely that this would happen en masse; most employees are reasonably conscientious about their work. If this were the case for one or two managers, then disciplinary action might be needed to correct their behavior.
  
  
• The deadline may be unrealistically tight. After all, processing approvals is not the only work a manager has to do. In that case, it might be best to renegotiate a more realistic deadline time.
  
  
• The managers may be sent more work by workflows than they can realistically complete. A quick check of the workload on a particular manager (e.g., using transaction SWI5 [workload analysis]) would help to determine if the manager is overwhelmed with workflow work. In this case, it might be best to distribute the work across more people by using the workflow to delegate some of the work to other people.
  
  
• Managers might be unaware that there is work to complete if they don’t regularly check their workflow inbox. The best response in this case might be to set up email notifications of work items using standard programs RSWUWFML or RSWUWFML2 (extended email notifications). These programs send an email to the managers whenever work items are added to their workflow inboxes.
  
  
• On a number of occasions, managers may be simply unable to complete their work by the preset deadlines. For example, they might be attending conferences, team-building retreats, or strategy workshops where system and even email access is limited.

As it was told to me, at this company the senior managers were simply tired of having their workflow inbox filled with all these redirected approval tasks from their subordinates. So the senior managers came up with a solution: increase the workflow escalation time from three days to 20 days.

What’s wrong with this solution? Well, we were talking about escalation, weren’t we? How to speed up the process, not how to slow it down. This situation is not as unusual as it seems. Despite the fact that one of the major aims of most businesses in using workflow is to improve the speed of business processes, escalation procedures occasionally seem aimed at slowing them down, or at least allowing slow progress to be ignored.

What really happened is that the escalation approach used in the workflow was unrealistic. It failed to consider the clash of business policy against reality. Let’s look at the impact of using the business policy literally as the escalation approach in the workflow.

Business policy:

• If the first-level manager is unavailable to approve request, the senior manager approves it.

Applied to the workflow as:

• If the first-level manager has not completed the task within five days, the task is redirected to the senior manager.

How this applies to a real-life scenario:

• David has been having some lower back pain. The occupational health and safety representative suggests that a new ergonomic office chair would help. So David puts in a request for a new office chair on Monday.
  
  
• Scott, David’s first-level manager, is busy. He doesn’t see any particular urgency in the request (after all, David has been living with this problem for some time), he has 10 meetings to attend over the week plus a complex report to review and summarize, and he’s off-site for the last two days of the week and won’t have online access during this time. So Scott never gets to the request. After five days, the “approve purchase” request is automatically escalated to the senior manager, Naomi.
  
  
• The following week, Naomi is even busier. She doesn’t know about David’s back problems and she has 15 meetings to attend over the next week plus a presentation to the board. The “approve purchase” request sits in her inbox.
  
  
• David is frustrated that his new chair has not been approved, and the old chair is making his back problems worse. He knew Scott, his first-level manager, would be away Thursday and Friday, but he couldn’t get the request redirected any earlier. Naomi would have had time to look at the request, but has her personal assistant is holding all calls while she prepares her presentation to the board.

How does it all end?:

• David is unhappy. He didn’t get his chair.
  
  
• The first-level manager, Scott, is unhappy. His senior manager, Naomi, is blaming him for all these requests that keep getting redirected to her inbox, but she still expects him to finish the complex report on time.
  
  
• Naomi is unhappy. Her inbox is filled with all the requests the first-level managers didn’t act on in time, so that she has to search in her inbox for her own tasks.
  
  
• Statistics show that the purchase approval workflow is getting slower.
  
  
• Everyone complains that “it takes too long to get purchases approved.”

Surely there must be some way of keeping everyone happy while complying with the business policy. It all comes back to correctly identifying who should escalate the work. If it is to be effective, the escalation approach used in a workflow needs to deal with reality first, and work out how to comply with the business policy afterward.

How do you decide who is the best person to escalate? Assess who has the greatest motivation to complete the process. The motivation could be personal (I want this) or career-based (this is my responsibility).

In most workflow scenarios, the best person to escalate the workflow is the person who started the scenario, but that’s not always the case. Consider the scenarios in Table 1.

What happened with the last scenario? The employee is only doing data entry, usually enters many invoices, has no personal stake in a particular invoice being approved, and isn’t interested in what happens after data entry. There’s not much point in telling the employee the invoice approval is overdue.

So you look for who else has a motivation for making sure the process is completed. In this case, it’s a team of people — the accounts payable team that is responsible for reconciling invoices and payments and dealing with complaints from vendors when payments are delayed because of unapproved invoices.

In the scenarios above, it’s quite likely that the applicable business policy would state that delayed requests should go to a more senior manager once the deadline is passed. In practice this isn’t necessary unless the original manager who is supposed to take action is sick or on leave.

Automatic escalation to a senior manager just frustrates everyone involved. It’s much better to have the escalator assess the urgency of the request first. Often a simple phone call to the original manager is enough. If the original manager is sick or on leave and hasn’t assigned a workflow substitute, then it’s up to the escalator to decide whether the work can wait, or contact the more senior manager or workflow administrator to explain the urgency and ask for the work to be redirected.

Once you have decided who should escalate the work, it’s easier to decide how they should be contacted. Ask the question: Is the escalator allowed to complete the work?

If the answer is yes, then it makes sense to have the workflow automatically redirect the work item to him or her when the deadline is passed. For instance, to redirect the invoice approval request to the accounts payable team. If the answer is no, then the workflow should simply send an email to the escalator. This email should contain sufficient information so that the escalator can assess the real urgency of the request and identify whom to contact to ensure the work is completed.

Now you have made sure the escalation will be effective in real-life scenarios, i.e., the best person will be told that the work is overdue, increasing the likelihood that corrective action will be initiated promptly. However, if the escalator isn’t allowed to execute the work item, how do you get someone else to execute it at the escalator’s request?

Let’s look at the options shown in Table 2.

These are just a few suggestions. The better you understand the realities of the business scenario, the more likely you are to think of other effective solutions. Whatever escalation approach you use, just make sure it’s going to make your process faster, not slower. For example, in the ergonomic chair scenario you might be able to add an “it’s urgent!” flag to David’s purchase request. When the request is marked as “urgent,” then the standard deadline could be reduced and the work item priority changed to indicate that this is an express work item in the manager’s workflow inbox.

Jocelyn Dart

Jocelyn Dart is a senior solution consultant at SAP Consulting working in Australia/New Zealand. She currently specializes in workflow and Supplier Relationship Management (SRM). As well as speaking at various SAPPHIREs and at ASUG, Jocelyn is a co-author of the book, Practical Workflow for SAP.

You may contact the author at jocelyn.dart@sap.com.

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