Creating a Workflow Schedule

Now that your Template and Role Groups have been configured, you can Schedule your Workflow Process. In this section, you will select your faculty candidates and Role Groups, as well as define the deadlines for each step.

Scheduling a Process is the final administrative step before the process launches, when candidates will be able to submit to, and other participants will be able to review, the process. With that in mind, you should verify that your Template and Role Groups are finalized before preparing the Schedule. 

Steps to Create a Schedule

When creating and confirming a workflow schedule, administrators should verify that candidate appointment data, reviewer assignments, and workflow configuration have all been reviewed. Refer to the Checklist for Launching a Workflow Schedule article for a structured guide that helps ensure the schedule is correctly configured before launch.

1. In the Workflow Configuration utility, locate the "Actions" column in the Templates table. You will find an arrow that corresponds to each Template.
2. Click the arrow for the Template you are scheduling, and click the "Schedules" button that appears.
3. You will be brought to a list of all Schedules for that Template. Click the "Add Item" button in the top right corner of the screen.
4. Give the schedule a logical name that describes this process. Your name should include a time element, since each Schedule will be used only once. (For example, "College of Education - 2017 Annual Review")
5. Select the Launch Date. This is the date when faculty members under review will be given access to make their submissions. Consider confirming the schedule with a future launch date to review appointment routing or verify configuration. This allows administrators to generate the Appointments and Reviewers report and validate routing while preserving time to make adjustments if necessary. To learn more about this report, refer to Appointments and Reviewers Report. 
   If edits are required after confirmation, the schedule can be terminated from the Actions menu, updated as needed, and then confirmed again.

6. For the first step, you will configure the due date, select the Candidates, and select the dates over which any custom reports should run.

   Note: The custom report dates work just as they do in Run Reports in Faculty Success. So for an Annual Review of activities in the 2017 calendar year, you would choose January 1, 2017 to December 31, 2017. That way, the report will generate with that faculty member's activities only from that year.
7. Configure all remaining steps with appropriate due dates, Role Groups and email options.
8. Click Save. This will save the progress you've made, without marking it as ready to launch.
9. The Schedules Table will now show a status of "Pending" for this process.

Please note that processes launch at 12:00:01 AM Local Time, and Deadlines register as of 11:59:59 PM Local Time.

Enabling Joint Appointments for a Schedule

For more information on configuring a schedule for joint appointments, please refer to the following Configuring a Schedule for Joint Appointments article.

Selecting Candidates in a Schedule

Within the Faculty Submission step of a Workflow Schedule, you will select the candidates for this schedule, or the faculty members who will submit their materials. You have two options to select users.

Select by Bulk Load

Clicking this link will take you to a "Bulk Load Candidates" window where you can add UserID’s to the open text box. This is a good option if the faculty you need to include in this schedule are not part of a predefined group, like College or Department, or all fit into a grouping of same tenure status or rank (Groups are determined by your owner data paths in your instrument).

After adding in the UserID’s, click Validate to confirm all individual users exist and are enabled in your system.

Post validation, you'll see a list of all confirmed users that will be added to the schedule and any users that failed validation with error messages.

Add Candidates

Filters

Administrators can filter by candidate criteria (e.g., College, Department, Discipline, Rank, Tenure Status). The system uses "OR" within categories and "AND" between categories. 

For example, selecting multiple Colleges will return a list of candidates in any ONE of those Colleges. Selecting both a College and Tenure Status as a filter returns a list of candidates with BOTH the selected College and Tenure Status

Note: Selections available under Institutional Criteria depend on the Data Paths available in your system. Owner data paths may be added to your system by submitting a work request. These paths are commonly based on information stored on Personal & Contact Information, Yearly Data, or Permanent Data.

A selection for Additional Filters is available for Data Paths configured for your system beyond College, Department, and Rank.

To generate a list of candidates based on your selected filters, click the Apply button. Once you do this, the system will display a list of candidates that match your criteria. This list will be presented in a clear, tabular format, making it easy to review. Each row in the table represents an individual candidate, and the columns correspond to the various filter options you selected from the left-hand pane.

By default, candidates will only be shown in the Candidates table based on their primary, or first-listed appointment. De-select the option under Joint Appointments to include candidates with any appointment meeting the selected criteria.

Candidates can be either selected for inclusion or removed from the list by interacting with the checkboxes located next to each candidate's name. By clicking on the checkbox adjacent to an individual candidate's name, you can toggle that candidate's selection status on or off. Additionally, there is a checkbox situated within the column header labeled "Name," which will select all candidates currently displayed under the active filter criteria. It is important to note that if you de-select the checkbox found next to the "Name" column header, this action will result in all candidates being de-selected, regardless of any filters that might be applied to the list.

View Selections

Administrators review their selections within a dedicated View Selections flyout panel. This feature provides a convenient and organized way to manage and assess the chosen candidates all in one place. Additionally, if an administrator tries to close this flyout window without first saving their changes, the system will display a warning message. This prompt serves as a safeguard to help prevent any accidental loss of data, ensuring that all modifications or selections are intentionally preserved before exiting the panel.

Once you have completed the candidate selection process, be sure to click the Save button.

Setting Due Dates

You can choose between two types of due dates when setting the deadline for each step:

• Fixed Dates: a specific calendar date
• Days Until Due: specify the number of days the user has to complete the step. This will be presented to the process participant as a calendar date, calculated based on the number of days until due configured in the Schedule and the date on which the submission arrived in their inbox

Automatically Advancing Submissions at the Deadline

By default, Workflow process deadlines are soft, meaning submissions will not automatically advance to the next step if a deadline is missed. This behavior ensures that materials never progress before the participant is ready.

However, you also have the option to enforce deadlines on a step-by-step basis. When setting up your schedule, you'll notice that each step has an "Automatically advance to next step after due date?" option. This enforces the deadline for that step as a "hard" deadline, automatically advancing it to the next step if it hasn't already been advanced before the step's deadline.

This feature would be useful in a scenario where, for example, faculty have the option but are not required to respond by a certain date, such as June 23, 2023. You can enable the auto-advance feature on the appropriate step to automatically advance it to the next step after its deadline, so that it can auto-advance after June 23, 2023.

Note: When a submission is automatically advanced to the next step, any draft content saved by the reviewer is not published. If the draft needs to be added to the official submission, the reviewer or candidate would need to recall the submission to their step and complete to the next step.

Importantly, this setting can be retroactively applied to steps in active Schedules that have already launched. For instance, if you have a number of past-due submissions sitting at a particular step and want to force those submissions to the next step, you can enable this setting for that step and it will advance all current submissions as well as future submissions if they reach that step after its deadline.

If there are branching options configured at this particular step, you will also be able to choose the destination step (i.e., to which step the submission will automatically advance), as pictured below:

Configuring Email Notification Options

First you'll select your preferred send time for all of the recurring email notifications for this schedule (i.e., reminders, the 1 day warning, and past-due alerts).

You can choose from four options, all of which respect your institution's time zone:

• Morning (7:00am)
• Midday (12:00pm)
• Evening (5:00pm)
• Midnight (12:00am)

Then in the "Email Settings" area you can configure which notifications and reminders will be sent to participants at each step of your process, and at what frequency. Configuration options are explained in more detail in our How to Configure Custom Email Settings article.

If you choose to keep the default selections, users will be notified when their particular Step begins, and they will receive reminders on a weekly basis. Then, when users' actions are past due, they will receive Past Due Alerts every three days. You can see a sample email here.

Selecting Reports to Attach

If the Template your Schedule is using has one or more Report placeholders in one or more of its forms, you’ll see a “Reports” section appear for the corresponding step(s) in the Schedule setup page. In the Reports area you’ll:

• Select which of your institution’s full-service or self-service reports to attach to that step. Note that you can attach the following types of faculty accomplishment reports:
  • Full-Service Reports that are available to the Faculty security role
  • Self-Service Reports that have been built by an administrator and shared with faculty
• Specify the form label that will display next to the report attachment in the process participants’ view.
• Select the date range to use to run the report.

Once reports are attached to a workflow, they will be automatically generated for candidates when the schedule launches. Afterwards, the candidate has control over when the report is refreshed. If a report hasn't been refreshed in the last 24 hours, the system will notify the candidate with a blue banner that prompts them if they would like to refresh their report to ensure it reflects their most recent activities in Faculty Success.

Additionally, if the Report Auto-Refresh feature is enabled, the system will automatically generate the report when the schedule launches. The system will then check the "last refreshed" timestamp for each report when a task is opened. If a report hasn't been refreshed in the last 24 hours, it will be automatically refreshed, and the timestamp will be updated after the refresh is complete. This helps candidates keep their reports up-to-date without requiring them to manually refresh the reports in their workflow. For more information about this feature, refer to Managing Global Defaults Through System Settings.

Duplicating an Existing Schedule

If you need to run a process with mostly the same settings as another, with a few differences, you can save time building your new schedule by duplicating an existing one.

When you duplicate a schedule for an active process template, the duplicate will reflect a majority of the original schedule’s settings, like role groups, dates and days until due, auto-advance, email notifications, and report start and end dates.

To ensure you don’t accidentally end up with two identical schedules for the same people, the duplicate will not carry forward “Candidates”, so you’ll need to set those before launching. Also, if the schedule you copied uses role groups you’ve since deleted, you’ll need to select new role groups to use for the affected steps in your new schedule.

Please also be sure to give all of the settings a once-over before you launch your new schedule!

The Workflow module is available to add to Faculty Success for an additional fee. To learn more about adding it for your institution, please contact your Client Success Manager.