User Roles in a Human Workflow
- By InfoMajesty Inc on May 19, 2012
- Posted in: Business Process Management, Design
In my previous post “Main Considerations for a human workflow“, we briefly touched upon the the need to create a list of roles (and users) who will participate in a business process. In this post, let’s consider the topic in a bit more detail.
Usually, there are three categories of roles – Submitter, Approvers and Workers.
Approver is the most easily understood of the three roles. If we generalize this role a bit more, the main responsibility for a user in this role is to make a decision. Typically, the decision is whether to approve something or not, but some decisions may be more involved. E.g. in case of approving a project, the approver may approve a smaller budget or add conditions to his approval or may request to seek more approvals. The decisions that the user is expected to make in this role usually drive the actions that are available to this user in the interface that is presented.
Generally speaking, approvers are either people in specific business roles in specific departments like “Purchasing Coordinator” or in a management hierarchy within a business department like Manager, Sr. Manager, Director etc.
A user in the “worker” role is typically responsible for completing a task or an activity. If we consider “New Hire” workflow, there are several tasks that will fall under this role:
- Add the new hire to Active Directory and include username and email address to the next steps.
- Set up a cube and telephone for the new hire and provide details to the manager step.