Best method for 12 approvers - if not all approve within 7 days move to approver level

[scalawagd]

Hi Kim, the main reason I went that route with the parallel tasks was to ensure that they did not cancel each other out.  The request from the process owner was that all voting parties would have an opportunity to respond until the due date and time was reached.  So, using the parallel structure, the flexi tasks don't interact with each other... any number of people can respond approve or reject, or not at all, and everything is counted up at the end with the tally.  Hopefully I read your question correctly...  Please let me know if you have other questions.

[knickles]

Brian - yes I tried to use the parallel tasks so as long as one didn't reject, the others could still approve their tasks.  However, after 1 is approved, the workflow is cancelled when the 2nd approver tries to approve or reject.  My branches do update fields for either approve or reject so maybe that has something to do with it.

[scalawagd]

Hmm, there must be something different in the configuration of our tasks because mine will keep those other tasks open.  Each of my tasks are assigned to one SharePoint group, and each group just has one member.  Are yours set up that way?  Also, your theory about the field updates might have something to do with it... maybe you can save the values to variables and move those updates to later in the workflow or just disable them temporarily to test it out.  In my workflow, I have some updates to the item to record the number of all the yes, no, and no responses which happens later.

Here is a screenshot of the workflow history for an item in my list that has a due date and time of today at 5:00 pm.  The marketing one was responded to with "Approve", Accounting and MCSO responded with "Reject", and the others haven't responded, but they will remain pending until 5:00.

It definitely works, for these items.  I think I put all of the configuration settings into that blog post, but I can check on anything in there to make sure yours are set up the same way.  

[shaunlub]

If you are going to do multiple parallel approvals, I would advise against starting all at the same time - I have had bad experiences with multiple (10 or so) parallel dept approval processes starting at the same time - the workflow engine gets overloaded - so best to add a few 'wait for duration' actions delaying approval tasks so they start in staggered starts of around 3 or so approval tasks.

[scalawagd]

That's a great tip!  What kind of issues were you seeing?  Thanks!