Remember those days when you have an automated business process and it sits there waiting for someone to do something or approve a task and they just won't? Those days are over. Task Escalation has made it to Nintex Workflow for Office 365.
When you open Nintex Workflow from a List, you'll see this cool popup letting you know that you have new functionality.
There are few things that have changed, but we'll be focusing on the Task Escalation part in this post.
The Task Escalation functionality is available in the Assign a Task action and the Start a Task Process action. I do want to briefly mention that the user interface for those actions have changed slightly. The sections have new names. But it shouldn't be anything too surprising. The purpose of which, is to make for a better user experience.
But what is really important, is that we now have a new section called "Escalate and auto-complete options".
The default behavior, as you can see above, is "Do nothing". Which really means, if someone is slacking off and not responding to a task, your business process is on hold.
The other options are :
- Escalate to person or group
- Auto-complete the task
Escalate to person or group
I have to say, that one of my favorite parts about this, is that you can specify when a task is going to be escalated. But you don't have to have a static value. Most likely, you'll be using an item field or a variable. Probably a DateTime variable. That opens up the usage here dramatically. Not only can you specify when to escalate, but you can also add business or calendar days. That's impressive and again, make this functionality so much more powerful.
Don't forget about the option to information the original participants. You'll have the option to customize the email too. This may actually help them in future tasks, knowing that if they don't respond to a task in a reasonable amount of time, it will get escalated to the CEO!!!.
As part of this process, if you're going to set an expectation that the task will be responded to within a set amount of time, make sure you update the email those goes to the original participant, to they are aware. Also, don't forget to use Reminders!!.
Auto-complete the task
This is a piece of functionality where there is a person or group that is expected to respond. If they don't, there's no one else to go to. So we want to automatically complete the task, and that could be Approve, Reject or one of the other outcomes. The rest of the configuration is the same as the previous option.
There is help available for all new functionality.
Help for Assign a Task
Help for Start a Task Process
Conclusion
Interested in a trial of the Nintex Workflow for Office 365 product?
How about a demo of the Nintex products for Office 365?
If you have any questions about this new functionality, please feel free to leave a comment on this post.
