Acceptances

Approvals is the place that gathers all approvals related to the user, from all projects: those awaiting their decision, those they submitted and those they took part in. You do not need to open projects one by one to see what is waiting for a decision. The section is in the main menu, under Approvals, and is available to users with a full license. The menu item shows a counter of decisions waiting for the user (see Counter of pending approvals).

The section has two tabs: Approvals (the list described below) and Approval paths, that is, path templates (see Approval paths). The second tab is visible only to users with the approval path permission in a workspace; others see only the approval list.

An approval concerns a project baseline, to which a project charter can be attached (see Approving a baseline change and Approving a project charter). A request is sent for approval from the project, and the decision is made in the baseline window, on the Approval tab.

Approval list

The list on the Approvals tab contains approvals in which the user:

• is an approver on the current stage of a path, or was one on stages the path has already reached,
• submitted a request for approval.

Columns:

• Name — the baseline name. A red Decision Required tag marks an approval that is waiting for the user’s decision,
• Status — Awaiting approval, Approved, Rejected, Needs work, Cancelled or Pending (see Approval statuses),
• Approval — the path drawn as a row of arrows, one per stage. The arrow color shows the result of the stage: green — approved, red — rejected, blue — in progress, orange — needs work, grey — not started yet,
• Submitter — the person who sent the request for approval,
• Decision date — empty while the path is in progress; after it closes, the date of the last decision,
• Project — the project the request belongs to.

The order is fixed: first approvals with no decision date, that is, open ones, and among them those with the Decision Required tag; then decided ones, from the newest decision. Click the name or the drawn path to open the baseline in its project, straight on the Approval tab, where you make the decision.

Access to the project for the duration of the approval comes from permissions that an approver gets when the path reaches their stage.

Approval list filter

The filter on the right narrows the list. Conditions combine: setting two leaves the rows that meet both.

• Filter by name — matches any part of the baseline name,
• Status — Awaiting approval, Approved, Rejected, Needs work, Cancelled; you can choose several,
• Submitter — the list contains only people who submitted any request visible in the list.

Closing the filter bar clears all settings and restores the full list.

Counter of pending approvals

A red counter appears next to Approvals in the main menu and on the Approvals tab. It shows the number of decisions waiting for the user: the path has reached a stage where the user is an approver and has not decided yet. Rows in which the user is only an observer or the submitter are not counted.

The counter changes while you work, without reloading the page: it goes up when a path reaches the user’s stage and the Awaiting approval notification arrives, and goes down after the user decides. The counter loads only for users with a full license, because only they can be approvers.

Approval statuses

The approval status in the Status column follows the result of the path:

• Awaiting approval — the path is in progress and a stage is waiting for decisions,
• Approved — all stages approved,
• Rejected — an approver chose Reject,
• Needs work — an approver chose Needs work,
• Cancelled — the submitter withdrew the approval with Withdraw from approval,
• Pending — the path has not started yet.

Needs work sends the request back to the submitter instead of closing it: the approval ends, the baseline and attached charters get the Needs work status, and they can be corrected and sent again. The submitter is notified of the result. A finished path (also rejected, needs work and cancelled) stays in the baseline history, so approvers’ comments can be revisited. An approved path stays with the baseline as the current one.

An organization administrator can make a decision for an approver: on the baseline’s Approval tab, hovering over an approver’s row shows the Add decision icon. The Approval window with the Approval in place of: message saves the decision, and the entry shows the in place of annotation. A decision that has been made cannot be changed.

Baseline and charter statuses have their own names (Approved, Pending for a baseline; Approved, Draft for a charter) — see Project baseline and Project charter.

Approval column in other lists

The drawn approval path, a row of colored arrows, appears wherever you need to know where a request stands:

• in the list of baselines in a project (the Baseline tab, the Approval column),
• in the list of project charters (the Project charter tab),
• in baseline reports, as the Approval column added in the report column settings.

It works the same everywhere: click the arrows to open the baseline on the Approval tab. The column is visible when the organization has the Approvals module. The path is also visible on the printout of a project charter with the With approval option (see Exporting a project charter).