Assign Approval Tasks to Skill Pools

It has been a while since skill pools were introduced.  A skill pool is a group of people who share a specific capability.  Project managers have been assigning tasks to skill pools when they are not sure yet which specific individual(s) should be asked to work on these tasks.  Service level managers have been making use of skill pools to provide SLA coverage for services to groups of people who may work for different departments and at different sites, but have a certain competence or responsibility in common.

What’s new is the ability for change and project managers to assign an approval task to a skill pool.  Apart from being able to manually link a skill pool to approval tasks, change and project managers can also select a skill pool in approval task templates.  This can significantly improve the efficiency with which they plan their changes and projects.

Once an actual approval task reaches the status ‘Assigned’, all members of the skill pool are notified.  As soon as members of the skill pool have provided the required number of approvals, the status of the approval task is updated to ‘Approved’, causing the workflow of the change or project to continue.

On the other hand, when a member of the skill pool decides to reject an approval task before its required number of approvals has been provided, the status of the approval task is set to ‘Rejected’.  This causes the change or project to which the approval task belongs to be set to ‘Progress Halted’.  The manager of the change or project then receives a notification so that a decision can be made on how best to proceed.