Deadline escalation for user decision step

[Rick Bakker]

Greetings Fellow Workflowers,

I would like your opinion(s) on a new and strange way of handling deadlines.

I was recently at a site where I saw a way of handling deadline escalation
that I have not seen before. Basically a Decision step is connected to
a loop which has a wait step set to go off, say, every 3 days.

The first time the deadline expires on the Decision step, the loop is entered,
escalation agents are determined and a "Re-evaluate Agents" event is
created which
changes the agents on the original Decision step. The loop then waits for the
next deadline to pass after which deadline agents are determined again etc.

Normally if I create a workflow like this, I put the Decision step inside the
loop and re-create it after every deadline expiration.

As far as I can tell, this new method of doing this only has downsides:

- no new workitem means no email sent by Extended Notifications to the
  escalation agents (some of the workflows "solve" this by having an additional
  mail step within the deadline loop)
- if one of the agents opens up the workitem and then cancels out of
it (as they do)
  thereby inadvertently reserving the workitem, then this is not resolved when
  the deadline expires - the workitem remains reserved and the new escalation
  agents don't get anything in their inbox

So far I haven't been able to think of any advantages of this new approach.
Has anyone else encountered this method? Is there something I'm missing?
Any strong opinions?

thanks
Rick Bakker
hanabi technology