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Dear K2 community,

We have recently introduced K2 blackpearl in our organization and started the implementation of a first workflow. We selected one of medium complexity to a) get an idea of how difficult it is and b) establish some kind of organizational standard (naming conventions, ways to obtain line manager, ...). Since we don't have any K2 expertise in house yet we hired a K2 specialist to help us with the development. After more than four weeks the workflow is still only implemented incompletely and far from being ready for piloting it with selected, benevolent users. To give you an idea of the complexity: It has two to three levels of approval, stores some data collected in a form in a relational database, retrieves the line manager from Active Directory and sends out e-mails using Exchange Server. Developing the whole thing not using K2 (e.g., with C#/ASP.NET) would have taken one of our developers probably two to three weeks.

I am now a bit worried that, even with an experience K2 developer, automating a workflow takes much more time and effort than initially thought. So my question to you is:

 

How much time and effort do you usually spend developing a not too complex workflow?

 

I know that it is not possible to give an accurate number but some ballpark figures would really help me to further plan our automation projects.

 

Thank you for your support

 

Daniel

Hi Daniel,

 

I understand your concern but in my opinion the requirements you provided are way too high level to provide any kind of estimate.  Sorry.  We could build that in a day if you don't care about the details. But if you have specific requirements like emails have to be formatted a certain way, if your data has to be stored in databases with stored procedures, if your consultant had to design the database schema, etc etc etc... These are the details that could extend the work well into over a month of effort.

 

EDITED: I also want to highlight that your developer estimate may not have included a lot of functionality that comes with the backend of K2, like escalations and reporting, out-of-office functionality, etc!  So take that estimate with a grain of salt - what are you sacrificing that K2 comes with to get that 2-3 week turnaround?

With the information required I would say the base form and process could be as little as 4 hours but fine tuning everything could take a few weeks. I find that 90% of the time is involved in requirements gathering which would be the same regardless of the tool used to automate. After having done workflows in several platforms and tools including some .Net, If you were to replicate what you can do in a k2 form and workflow process with what you can do in .Net it is about 5 times the effort in and a much higher skill set. You still would not have the whole back end of the system which includes things like a: management console, Workflow UI, Work Queues, audit logging, Email integration, action workflow with email, security, data accessors, the ability to run multiple versions of same workflow, package and deployment. This is just to name a few of the advantages to a K2 workflow before you ever design anything.

　

The amount of time is always underestimated but not usually because of the development but because of the requirements. It does help to have a project manager or someone with that skill to "wrangle the cats".

 

Like others have said there is a lot of unknowns in your scenario, but looking at just what you said I could build what you requested in less than an hour, but obviously that depends greatly on how complicated the form and datastructure is.  How long would it take to code it?  Much longer.

 

The longer it takes to do in K2, the longer it will take to code the same.

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