Setting up approvals

Set up approval workflows and shorten approval lifecycles so your employees and agents get stuff done quickly. Here is an example to show you how approvals can be set up in Atomicwork:

• An employee requests a new laptop. Atom matches the request to a service in the catalog and creates a service request.

• A new laptop workflow is executed, so Atom sends an approval request to the requester's manager through Teams/Slack. If there are multiple approvers, all approvers get notified through Teams/Slack.

• The manager approves/declines the request either through the Teams/Slack card or by logging into the web portal and going to My actions > Approvals. Atom notifies the agent, updates the request, and notifies the requester of the decision based on the approval policy. If there are further steps in the workflow, for either the Approved or Declined decision, they are executed.

• Approvers can also ask Atom "What are my pending approvals?" and approve or decline requests directly from Atom's response.

Setting up an approval workflow

• Go to Settings > Enterprise automation > Workflow library. Select Organization to apply this across the organization, or select a workspace to apply it to that workspace only.

• Create a new workflow or choose the workflow where you want to add the approval.

Both request and change workflows can include the Send for approval action, allowing approvals to be configured across service requests, incidents, and changes.

• Click Perform an action and select Send for approval when you want to add an approval policy.

• Choose an existing approval policy. Approval policies are managed centrally from the 'Approval Policies' section in your workspace dashboard.

• You can also add the Manage approvers action to send reminders to pending approvers. This is useful in scheduled workflows that check for approvals that remain pending beyond a defined period and follow up automatically.

• Set up the actions that must be executed based on the approval decision. You can specify paths for Approved, Declined and Cancelled. The Cancelled path runs when a request is withdrawn or no longer needed while the approval is still pending.

Reminder notifications sent through Manage approvers use the standard template configured in the Notifications section.

Managing approvals

• Go to Settings > Enterprise automation > Approval policies. Select Organization to apply this across the organization, or select a workspace to apply it to that workspace only.

• You can search policies by name or the approval policy members.

• To start from an existing approval policy or global approval policy, open its three-dot menu (⋮) and select the Clone option, then adjust what you need.

Notes

• Any employee in Atomicwork can be added as an approver. Approvers can log into Atomicwork to view their pending approval requests through My actions > Approvals on the left navigation bar.

• Every workspace gets its own set of approvals. Approvers can be from any workspace.