Workflows to Complete Documents Overview

Collaborative workflows, provided as an optional Accolade feature, provide a means to define the sequence of steps and actions needed to create a complex deliverable or activity. Workflows are useful for deliverables and activities that need to be coordinated in a specific sequence. Workflows are primarily intended for the creation and review of documents, but they can be used to manage the creation of other things as well, such as prototypes.

Administrators and Process Designers create workflows and add them to the Template Library and to models, as necessary. Workflows added to the Template Library are available to add to a deliverable or activity at the process model level and at the project level. Workflows added to a model are required before a deliverable or activity's status can be set to Completed. Workflows added at the project level are considered optional and do not require completion prior the deliverable or activity's status being set to Completed.

Workflow Steps and Actions

Each step in a workflow is a single part of producing a document, such as creating a draft or having a portion of a document reviewed. Each step contains one or more actions needed to complete the step, or is an automated action that is run after the previous step completes. Each manual action has an owner who performs the action and a specified number of days that the action is scheduled to take. When a project is started, the document owner, Project Manager, or Process Manager starts the workflow. The owners of an action within a workflow are assigned permissions that determine if they can edit, publish, or approve deliverables or activities associated with the workflow.

Action owners can either approve a step, which moves the workflow to the action, or reject a step and move it back to a previous action in the workflow. For more information about workflows in projects, see Participate in Workflows Overview.

After all the steps in a workflow are approved, the deliverable or activity status is set to Completed.

See the following to get started: