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Written by Brent Martin
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Tuesday, 22 January 2008 |
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A friend of mine was working on a staffing model for an AP implementation and needed to know what kind of resources would be required for workflow. Could a functional person configure AP workflow, do you need a technical person and if so why. What I told him is below. How did I do?
It just depends on how “vanilla” their workflow process will be.
Workflow almost always requires App Designer work. If they want to use delivered workflows, you’ll still probably need to change approval ruleset amounts and e-mail message text at a minimum. If they want more approval levels than what’s delivered, or they want to use a different approval hierarchy, that’ll require even more approval ruleset changes along with SQL object and query changes. A good Func/Tech should be able to handle basic modifications to workflow like this.
There are some twists that make me lean more toward a technical resource: 1) Obviously if your client wants to build something from the ground up you’ll need to find a techie that knows workflow pretty well. 2) Exempting certain transactions from workflow requires application customizations and that’s normally handled by a technical type. 3) If your workflow needs to support multiple approval hierarchies or routings for different transaction types or business units you might want to consider a workflow expert to work it all out. 4) Setting up e-mail and/or blackberry approval would probably require deeper technical experience than most functional folks have.
In workflow, the devil is in the details and it’ll always take way longer than what you think it should (kind of like the Crystal check print program). You almost always end up with lots of variables to code for and test. If that’s not the case, they probably didn’t need workflow to begin with!
In general I don’t think you need a full-time resource doing workflow for the duration of the project, but you probably do need a strong functional person who can think through all of the scenarios and put together a really good design, and you might need a good tech person dedicated for several weeks to make that design a reality and be able to fix all of the little problems the users will certainly find.
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Last Updated ( Thursday, 12 June 2008 )
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