Work item escalation and notifications to several levels

[Zmudzin,Tomasz,VEVEY,GL-DS/DM]

Christiana,
 
I've had the "pleasure" of coming across requirements like this several
times -- although I seldom see companies pushing their managers to process
leave requests like this :-)   Unfortunately it's a cultural issue and as
such it may not be easy to beat. Sometimes people really crave to be "in
control" /or have the impression of it/ or simply want to have the stick,
just in case.
 
OK, I let my emotions go off now -- let's check the hard facts:
 
- Technically speaking you can set up a scenario like this.
- The hard part is convincing your customer that they will want to have it
switched off a month after go-live.
- You can argue about the need for non-blaming culture within an
organization. It probably won't help.
- Try convincing your customer that the higher you go up in the
organizational ladder, the LESS OFTEN the notifications will be read, and
the MORE ANNOYING they will be to the management flooded with lots of
messages anyway.
- As your scenario is not one of strategic importance to the survival of
your customer, show your customer's management that they are probably busy
with more important matters.
- Indicate that routing the notifications to the employees will actually get
the job done instead of reporting it as not done yet. The employees are the
actual stakeholders in the process, so they will inquire. The managers will
not necesserily have the time to do that.
- If the customer insists -- they're the king, so I'd recommend to implement
and wait. Just make sure the new feature can be switched off easily :-)
 
Kind regards,
Tomasz
 
-----Original Message-----
From: Cristiana d'Agosto [mailto:cristiana.dagosto at au.pwcglobal.com]
Sent: Tuesday, August 06, 2002 5:59 AM
To: SAP-WUG at MITVMA.MIT.EDU
Subject: Work item escalation and notifications to several levels
 
 
Hi all,
 
we are in 4.6c and the scenario described is for Leave Approval ie.
employee enters a leave request via ESS and the manager (1 Up) is the
immediate approver of the request.
 
In the current design for workflow, the result of any work item remaining
idle for 5 days is that the employee (initiator) receives a message to
notify him/her that no action has been taken by the manager. The new
requirement is that the manager at the next level (let's call it manager 2
up) will receive a notification of the outstanding work item after 5 days.
To ensure clear ownership of the approval process (I don't necessarly agree
with this), the work item itself will remain in the manager 1 up inbox only
ie. the manager 2 up is only notified that manager 1 up has not processed
the work item. If after a further 5 days the work item is still in the
manager 1 up inbox, a further notification will be sent to the manager 3 up
(!). The escalation of notifications will continue every 5 days until the
work item is processed or notification reaches the top of the org
structure.
 
I don't think this solution is good and I don't think it can be done. Have
you come accross such requirements before? Is it possible to do it? I am
still working on a way of convincing the client that this is not a good
solution. The way I see it you will just be sending heaps of
non-added-value mails to people that cannot process the work item anyway.
It is just a way of letting people know that someone is not doing their
jobs on the expected time frame.
 
Any ideas??
 
Thanks and regards
 
Cristiana
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