Elevating approval approvers

Hi there,

Some common recognizable situation we all know off, your Service Desk getting emails, phone calls, desk visits about performing small tasks in ServiceNow. Change user accounts, group members, setting delegates, delegates for users that are on a break, elevating an approval approver because a user is on a break, etc.. Depending on you process, the Service Desk might be able to perform these tasks them selfs or they might need to sync with the Ops ServiceNow team to perform these simple, manual, time-consuming tasks. In case the Service Desk has to sync with the Ops ServiceNow team a customer is also not helped immediately, etc..
O man… let's do something about these situations!

In this article, I'll describe one situation, that we picked in our organization:

Elevating approval approvers

Oke, still semi-manually. Though in short, the Service Desk is able to change the approver on approvals thru a simple UI Action. Changing the approver to the manager of the approver, "elevating approval approvers".

Why

If a user would be on a break, and approval groups were not altered, no delegates where set, etc., an approval record could be pending until the user would be back from his/her break. Entering a delegate might be too much, or you might not know how long the user is on a break, etc..
This is why we choose to have an option to elevate the approver. Specifically, to the manager of the user. We choose not the have a possibility to change the approver to whoever or to let the Service Desk approve. We only choose for elevating the approver too the manager. Simply because the Service Desk should not be responsible/accountable (and no discussion on who to set as an approver), the user self or his/here manager should be responsible/accountable.

Obviously, there are multiple ways to think of on how to do this in your organization. Maybe this doesn't fit for you or you just want to fully automate this. That's fine! This is just a way, and a way which you can apply rapidly.

How

The Service Desk agent is looking at the approval record. Out-of-the-box, the agent has write access to approval record in state "requested", though no write access on the "approver" field. Though, luckily we also don't want to change the approver manually, looking up the manager, etc.. There's no need for this. This logic could well be put into a UI Action, which the Service Desk agent only has to select.

Obviously, you might want to register something. A call, an incident, a request, etc.. That's up to you. Here just two UI Actions.

1) Elevating the approver to the approvers manager;
2) Elevating the approver to the approvers cost center manager (+ a check if the cost center manager isn't also the approver self…).

1)

2)

Note: In these examples, I used in the condition a hardcoded group name. Ideally, you would want to use roles or a group which is stored in a system property.

End result

And that's it actually. Not that much to it! Also a heads up for one of our Ops engineers who is keen on reducing these simple, manual, time-consuming tasks: Leander Burger.

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Hope this helps some community members a bit. Again, you might not agree on the (full) path chosen for the elevating approval approvers this way. Though it's much more about the thought of limiting those simple, manual, time-consuming tasks. Limiting that the Service Desk has to sync with the Ops ServiceNow team while the customer is waiting, waiting, waiting. While a full automated solution might take you a while, other teams might be involved, etc., a simple UI Action like this would take an experienced ServiceNow developer maybe 5 to 10 minutes!

Kind regards,
Mark

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