Workflow Best Practices

Workflows with Conditions

When using conditions, workflows:

Should always have at least one condition at the workflow level. Action conditions may be used to further define the specific parameters, but may not necessarily be required.
Do not require both an event and action condition.
Should not repeat actions. Instead, you should put conditions that are separated by OR (or all ANDs) in the event conditions and those that are separated by AND (or all ORs) should be in the actions conditions.

Record Stage

Where appropriate, conditions should be set at workflow level to only run on active records. This will significantly reduce the impact on system performance and ensure that no erroneous changes are made to historic records.

Workflow Type Charge

When configuring Change type workflows, always specify the field that it is looking at and include a column has changed condition. This ensures that the workflow/action will only execute when that specific field has changed, as opposed to executing on any change to any element on the record.

ANDs and ORs

To validate multiple fields in a warning so there aren't three separate warnings displaying at once, you can repeat the AND part of the condition for each OR part.

Example:

You create a validate warning on the Primary Client, Estimated Fees, and Probability if the Stage changes to Proposal.

The event condition is set to Stage has changed and the validation warning has the following action conditions:

Stage equals Proposal AND Primary Client empty OR
Stage equals Proposal AND Est. Fee equals 0
OR Stage equals Proposal AND Probability empty.

The Stage equals Proposal AND has to be repeated for each field that you're validating against.

Column (Field) Change Actions

Use caution when applying column change actions. The Column Change Configuration dialog box allows you to specify a field that you want Vantagepoint to change when a workflow action is triggered, and the value in that field.

Pay close attention when you select the Level field on the Workflow form. This option allows you to specify which specific level to run the workflow on and perform the calculations/updates using the values on that particular level.

For example:

If the organization = X, then set Project Manager = John Adams

If the organization = Y, then set Project Manager = Wendy Williams

WBS	ORG	PM VALUE THAT WILL BE SET
Project	X	John Adams
Stage 1	X	John Adams
Task 1	Y	Wendy Williams
Stage 2	Y	Wendy Williams

Use caution when using the Apply to lower levels checkbox on the Column Change Configuration dialog box. Select this option to apply changes to lower WBS levels and to calculate the value at the level set on the action and push that very same value down to all lower WBS levels.