Excluded Agents?

[Jim Sauceman]

Workflow Gurus,
 
I have the following situation in a release 4.6B Workflow:
 
In some cases within our organization, a person may occupy two distinct
positions within a given approval workflow. For example, a professor may be
both the Department Head of Chemistry and Acting Dean of the College of Arts
and Sciences. I have a workflow that requires the approval of the Department
Head followed by the approval of the Dean. For most departments, these are two
different individuals and there is no problem. In a few cases, when this is
the same person, I would like for her/him to only have to approve the document
one time (acting as either the Department Head or the Dean, but not both).
 
I thought that Excluded Agents was the obvious answer to this situation.
However, when I created a container table of previous agents who have approved
the document, and specified this table as Excluded Agents, I got unexpected
results. I expected that since the Selected Agent (the Dean) was an Excluded
Agent because she/he had already approved the document (as the Department
Head), the system would simply mark the second work item as completed and the
workflow would move on. However, the workflow stalled on the Dean Approval
step. I suspect that this was because the only Selected Agent was an Excluded
Agent.
 
Am I misunderstanding the design concepts behind Excluded Agents? Is there a
way to achieve my desired results?
 
Jim Sauceman.............................sauceman at tennessee.edu
University of Tennessee..................Voice: (865) 974-2448
Manager, Database and Technical Support..Fax:   (865) 974-4810
Project IRIS Workflow Team Leader