Stage gate approvals with Nintex Workflow for Project Server

By blurg64

A common request from people that develop workflows within Project Server is how to create a simple approval process for a project to transition a stage gate, so I thought I would write a blog post covering off how you can achieve it with Nintex Workflow for Project Server.

The stage gate logic I am going to use, is outlined in the flow chart below.

Stage Gate Approval Overview

The approval will give the user two options, either approve and move into the next stage of the project, or reject the approval and stay in Stage 1.

Before we get to the approval part, the workflow logic needs to set a few things up. The initial stage, some status information, and to populate a workflow variable with the project name (which we will use in the approval later on).

 

Stage Gate - Initial Stages

This workflow makes use of a number of variables to store information read from the project as well as variables about the state of the project.

Stage Gate - Workflow Variables

Next up, before we get into the rejection loop we are going to set the Stage Approval variable to ‘No’. This variable is important as when it is set to ‘Yes’ it will break out of the loop and continue into the next stage.

Stage Gate - Set Approval Variable

 

Once the variable is set, we can move into the loop.

Stage Gate - Loop

 

Setting the loop up is really simple, basically we want to ensure the loop continues to loop whilst the Stage Approval variable is equal to ‘No’.

Stage Gate - Configure Loop

Once we are in the loop the first action is to ‘Wait for a Submit’, this ensures that we only proceed to create an approval if the user has clicked on submit for the project. Next we read in the users we wish to send the approval to, in this case we are using the ‘Read Project Security Group’ action, set to read in the Project Server ‘Portfolio Managers’ group and to store the information in the Portfolio Managers variable.

Stage Gate - Security Group

In the example above, I have also included a ‘Set Status Information’ action to update the Status Information for the user and let them know that the workflow is ‘Waiting for Approval’.

Stage Gate - Set Status Information

Next we need to actually set up the task. In this example, I have used a Nintex Flexi Task, which has a number of advantages over a normal to-do task:

  • We can assign as many approval options as we want (not just two!!)
  • There is out of the box logic to collate the results (majority, first past the post etc)
  • It provides downstream options at design time for further actions Of course, just like a normal task list in Nintex, you also get the value of highly customised notifications, escalations, delegation and reminders all out of the box and really simple to configure.

For our purposes, the flexi task will be configured to assign a task to the users we retrieved into the Portfolio Managers variable earlier.

Stage Gate - Flexi Task

You can also see that the Task name has been configured to create tasks named ‘Stage Gate Approval : ’ using the Project Name we retrieved into a variable earlier on in the workflow. For this blog post, I am not going to set up the other options such as Reminders and Escalation.

Next we need to configure the various actions to perform depending on the outcome of the approval.

 

Stage Gate - Flexi Task Actions

As you can see above, if the task is approved, the Stage Approval variable is set to Yes, which causes the workflow to exit the loop, however if the task is rejected, the Status Information is updated to update All Approver Comments and the loop starts again, going back to wait for a Project submit.

Stage Gate - Set Approver Comments

Finally, all that is needed is to add the actions to set the next stage once we have exited the loop.

Stage Gate - Final Stage

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As you could imagine, the whole workflow itself can get quite long, so to that end I have uploaded an image of the whole workflow which you can download here.

So what does it look like in action?

Once a project has been created that uses the workflow, a task will be created in the Project Server Workflow Tasks list for each of the users that are part of the Portfolio Managers group. As you can see in the screenshot below, the task follows the naming convention we set up above.

Stage Gate - Workflow Approvals

Clicking on the task will bring up the default flexi task approval box (for those of us a bit more adventurous this can be customised with InfoPath 2010 to make it look as sexy as you want).

Stage Gate - Task Approval

 

As you can see, the flexi task has automatically added links to the Workflow Status and Project Details pages so the reviewer can view the relevant information before they make a decision.

So as you can see, setting up a stage gate approval in NW4PS is pretty simple and this one took about five minutes to build from scratch. Of course if you are going to have many stage gate approvals you may want to consider moving the actions into an action set, or saving the approval as a snippit to make it easier to view and reuse. You could also look at extending the workflow to add some extra logic to handle those cases if the read security group action fails to determine any users, using a run if action. There are a wealth of possibilities, so get coding Smile