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Production Environment Availability |
2023-10-04 |
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Affected User Roles and Areas |
Organization Administrators, Product Management Administrators |
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Feature Video |
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Related Blog |
Summary
Whether driven by legislation or simply a desire to get arms around the list of products that have been leveraged during the last few school years, administrators are more thoroughly vetting edtech products in order to approve them for use. States, districts and schools have developed approval processes for these products and use a variety of tools to track and manage the process and the details.
With this release, LearnPlatform by Instructure users can now build repeatable, automated processes as Multi-step Workflows. These workflows activate based on a new product request or when a specific date is reached, and engage stakeholders like IT teams, curriculum, technology coaches, and classroom educators in tasks that need to be completed through the process.
Change Benefit
Organizations now have the ability to create more robust, automated product vetting workflows inside LearnPlatform:
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Build Multi-step workflows, which are started from a new product request or a date.
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Leverage a template to build the workflow, for a new product request or a date-driven workflow.
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View and manage active workflows throughout the decision making process
Feature Walkthrough
Building a workflow:
Go to Settings>Workflows. You will notice the Workflow Builder button now includes a drop down with 3 choices. Start building your workflow from a template, or start from scratch.
Workflow Name: This will show up in LearnPlatform in a variety of places, so should be detailed enough to be meaningful. A good example may be “MSD New Product Approval Process” or “EdTech Contract Renewal Review”.
Description: This is for reference and support only. We may display this somewhere in the future, but can be especially helpful when multiple stakeholders may need to understand the purpose of a workflow.
Workflow Type: Choose from Date-Driven (previously called 'Date-Triggered') and Product Request Workflows. The only difference in functionality is the starting event. All other workflow functionality is the same.
Starting Event: For Date-Driven, this is based on a date column. Administrators can use Contract End Date or a custom column. They can set when the workflow starts in relation to this date by setting the number of days on/before/after the date in that column.
Automations
Automations run at the completion of the step (or starting event) directly before them. If automations are added to the Starting Event, they will run immediately after the workflow is activated.
Steps
Steps are where reviews are assigned. Each Step assigns the selected form to user(s) or group(s).
When the step begins, the reviewers will receive an email and see the form assigned in the 'My Tasks' area of LearnPlatform. This ensures the appropriate stakeholders are engaged at the right time.
Steps run in sequential order, and do not move forward until all tasks in that step are complete. At the completion of a step, any added automations would run immediately before beginning the next step.
Step Name - This will display in LearnPlatform so should be specific enough to be meaningful. It should be descriptive of the process or goal of this step. Some examples may be: "Curriculum Team Review" or "Stage 1 Technology Review".
Form - Administrators can always select the System Default Review Form, but will gain the most value from these reviews if they take advantage of custom review forms. If they are building their workflow first, they can always assign the System Default Review Form, save the workflow as inactive, and go back and create the review forms and reassign after.
Add Reviewers - This is where administrators assign who gets the form they just selected in this step. Keep in mind:
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The workflow will not move forward until the step is complete.
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If multiple users are added to this step, all must complete the review before the workflow will mark the step as complete.
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Group tasks require 1 member of the group to complete for the step to be considered complete. *Currently group assignments are functioning as such: If there are 3 people in the group, all three receive the task in My Tasks.
Once the first member completes the review, the other members will no longer see the task in My Tasks. This use case was designed for scenarios where there are a group of reviewers.
Due Date - In Workflow Builder, this is phrased as “How long should this take take to complete?”
Because we don’t know when a task will get assigned, we can’t add specific due dates. When a task is assigned, it will calculate and apply a due date based on the number of days entered here. Due dates, at this point, serve as guidance. Reviews can still be completed when past due. In future work we may allow workflows to move forward on the due date, or use the field in other ways.
Automations - Again, automations will occur when a Step completes. Therefore if you add an email automation to a review step, it will be sent when the Review is completed in My Tasks. If you also added a status change automation, the status would be changed when the Review is completed in My Tasks.
Add Conditions to a Workflow Step:
You can now set a condition on a step to only be run if the product has/does not have specific statuses or tags. You can also set a combination of conditions to run the step if any/all/none of the conditions are met.
Managing your Tasks:
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When a workflow step is automatically started, it will send a task to the assignee with the form for them to complete. They will automatically receive an email.
When the assignee goes to My Tasks, they will see any tasks assigned to them, including ones from Workflows. Here they can fill out the Review form and submit their recommendation.
They also have visibility to all steps previously completed for this workflow, and can see how other stakeholders have responded in their reviews.
Managing your Workflows
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When a product is requested, it typically will go to the Request table. All admins in the account will receive a notification about this request, and the email will direct them to the Request table.
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When a product request is submitted and kicks off a workflow - this will display in the new Workflows table. An email notification will only be sent if an automation was added in the workflow.
When on the Workflows page, administrators can see a list of Products that are going through/have gone through a workflow. Each product going through a workflow sometimes may be referred to as a workflow run, but essentially it is the product going through the steps and decisions set in this process.
Here you will see the Workflow Name, Product Name, Start Date of the Workflow, Progress of the workflow, the current step and Product Status and Privacy Status, giving you visibility to important decisions that may have been made for that product.
Each Workflow run has a kebab menu allowing admins to Preview Process or View Workflow.
Preview Process opens a modal showing the workflow visual process
View Workflow opens the Workflow Details for a Product. (see below for more details)
Workflow Details for a specific product:
This page will display all the workflows for a product.
