Introducing Approvals

Approvals are workflows that are initiated by a requester or process and require an approver to review and approve or reject the request.

Approval Types

These are the standard type of approvals in the system:

Escalation

Use this workflow to escalate the risk to the business unit ("BU") above your own, thereby passing ownership to it (you might say, passing it from your risk register to theirs).

De-escalation

Us this workflow to return ownership of a previously escalated risk back to the escalating BU, reversing the escalation process.

Change Managing BU

Use this workflow if ownership for a risk should be passed from the current BU to another (that you can freely choose).

Stage Gate Approval

Submits a request to have the risk progressed to the next stage in the lifecycle (relevant only if the right to update risk stages is restricted).

Approver Identification

For all above approval types, the system will determine who the approver should be. It is always the user identified as the risk owner of the relevant business unit (either of the current - for Stage Gate Approval - or the receiving BU for approvals of BU ownership change).

Viewing/Working with Approvals

Risk Approval History

Within a risk, click on the Approvals tab at the top.

In the top left section, the screen shows which BU currently owns this risk. If an escalation has taken place, then the details of the Previous BU on the right will show which BU escalated it (both will be the same if no escalation has taken place).

The bottom section lists any approval records previously created for the risk, with status and date information.

Processing Approvals

Approval Type: Risk Escalation

Submit Escalation Request

Click + New Risk Approval to add an Approval Request and select the Request Type "Escalation" (as per the Approval Types explained above): 

The screen now shows further fields as follows:

Fill in any comment in the Requester Comments field and click Save.

The system will now generate a Name for the approval record. It will also retrieve the 'To BU' and the associated approver, being the BU next level up in the hierarchical structure defined in Business Units.

This may take a few second, as it is done by a background process. Click Refresh at the top until you see these details filled in. 

To finally submit the request for approval, set the Submit Approval Request switch to Yes (note that this switch will be greyed out until the To BU details are retrieved).

Click Save & Close at the top to finish. You will now see this Approval Request added to the list shown at the bottom of the screen, as an unapproved record.

Escalation Approval

The approver will now receive an email, showing all relevant details of the request (i.e. type of request 'Risk Escalation', name of the risk, link to the risk, From BU, To BU).

The approver may click the Approve or Reject button shown in the email. Clicking either button will show a Comments field, which can be filled in optionally. 

When finally clicking Submit the process completes. 

Details in the risk Approvals screen are showing details of the completed Approval (if approved):

If the approver chose to reject the request, then the only update will be to the approval record itself, showing an Approval Status of 'Rejected'.

Approval Type: Risk De-escalation

Works just like Escalation above, using the Previous BU as the target for the approval process.

Approval Type: Change Managing BU

Same workflow experience, however lets you manually pick the 'To BU' rather this being filled in by the system.

Approval Type: Stage Gate Approval

Requests approval from the Risk Owner of the current managing BU.

On approval, the workflow updates the Risk Stage to the next one in the defined risk lifecycle process.