Approvals and Rejections in Plans
Approvals and rejections are now available in the plans submission process. In addition, improvements to email notifications and the overall submission process make it easier to work with plans.
When you create a plan, you can now add approvers for each contribution group. The assigned approvers have the authority to accept or reject submissions. This is an improvement over previous versions of Planning Analytics Workspace, where an owner or co-owner could only reset an unsatisfactory submission.
Event-triggered email is now sent to relevant plan users when any of the following events occur in a plan. The email includes details on the event and, when applicable, a link to the location in the plan where you can take further action or review more information.
| Event | Email recipients |
|---|---|
| A plan step is opened | Members of all groups that are assigned to the step |
| A plan step is submitted | Approvers that are assigned to the group that has submitted the step The plan owner and co-owners |
| A submitted step is rejected | The submitter of the rejected step |
| A submitted step is approved | The next in line approver, if any The plan owner and co-owners |
For example, when a plan step is submitted, approvers who have been assigned to the group that submitted the step receive an email similar to this. The email would indicate the actual step name, step contributor name, and group name for the submission. The approver can click the Review submission button in the email to open the submission and either approve or reject it.
In addition, the submission process has been enhanced to provide more insight and options for owners, contributors, and approvers.
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You can now assign one or more approvers to a plan step. Approvers review step submissions and determine the disposition of the submissions.
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When you add an approver to a step, the approver name is prefixed with a number in the Approver list. These numbers represent an approval hierarchy. When approver 1 approves a submission, it is routed to approver 2, and so on until the last approver approves the submission.
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If a submission is approved, the step remains closed for submissions to the group who submitted it.
If a submission is rejected, the step is re-opened for the group who initially committed the submission. However, the assets included in the step are not reset; contributors can resume working on the assets in the same state they were in when the initial submission was made.
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The plan page shows the state of submissions for each step. A submission is not identified as completed until it has been approved.
When no submission has been made for a step, the Submissions line does not include a status bar.
The yellow indicator in the status bar represents the percentage of submissions that are pending approval. When all submissions for a step are approved, the status bar appears dark green.
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Each step includes a link to the Submissions page. You can click the link to view the submission log for the step. The log captures the history and comments for all submissions. You can use the Pending approval, Completed, and Waiting submission tabs to focus on submissions in any of those labeled states.
Plan owners can view all log entries while approvers can see only log entries for contributor groups they have been assigned to. Contributors can see only the log entries that apply to the group to which they belong.