Concept: Business Process Delegation

You can delegate all or specific business processes from your My Tasks, for a specified period of time. Tenant-level settings governing self-service delegation determine which types of users can serve as a delegate. The available options are

Anyone

,

Peers

,

Subordinates

, and

Superiors

.

You can also

Apply Routing Restrictions during Delegation

using tenant-level settings. When you select this option, Workday applies business process routing restrictions to delegates. When routing restrictions prevent Workday from routing a business process to a delegate, Workday routes the business process to an

Alternate Delegate

that you select when you manage delegation settings. When you enable the

Apply Routing Restrictions during Delegation

check box and a delegate approves a step, Workday considers the delegate to be a prior approver. The ability to act on a step goes away when it has a routing restriction on a prior approver, even when it's a parallel step to the

Approval

step. The delegate won't have permission to complete the next step because of the routing restriction on the step, and the delegate is now a prior approver.

Example: A business process definition contains:

Step
a
:
Initiation
Step
b
:
Approval
(a parallel step 1)
Step
b
:
To Do
(a parallel step 2)

Both

b

steps have routing restrictions to exclude prior approvers. The

Apply Routing Restrictions during Delegation

check box is enabled on the

Edit Tenant Setup - Business Processes

task. Once the delegate approves the

Approval

step, the delegate won't be able to complete the

To Do

step and won't see the task in their My Tasks. The

To Do

step has a routing restriction that prevents prior approvers from acting on the step.

When the

Use Default Alternate

check box is selected, Workday populates the

Alternate Delegate

field with the Primary Manager of each delegate. However, a delegating manager can’t select themselves as an Alternate Delegate for their direct reports.

Tenant-level settings for delegation are configured on the

Edit Tenant Setup - Business Processes

task. You can request delegation using the

My Delegations

task, or a Business Process Administrator can use the

Manage Delegation Settings

report to delegate tasks on your behalf. Once the delegation request is approved, all associated tasks are routed to the delegate user.

If you enable email notifications, the delegate receives notifications for awaiting tasks that's for the delegator.

Workday excludes a delegated business process from access to certain Workday functionality as well as functionality that requires connecting to another service, including:

Workday enables you to delegate the Initiating Action of selected business processes. Example: A manager can delegate the ability to create expense reports to an administrative assistant.

When a task is awaiting a user in My Tasks and that task has delegation enabled (

Allow Business Process Delegation

is enabled in the business process security policy), the user can delegate the task by selecting

Delegate Task

from the related actions menu of the My Tasks item.

Because Business Process Administrators can maintain step conditions on the

Initiation

step of both the

Delegate Task

and the

Request Delegation Change

business processes, a user can delegate a single business process task similarly to how the user delegates the Initiating Action of a business process. Example: A manager can delegate the ability to create one specific expense report to an administrative assistant.

A manager going on vacation needs to have their tasks performed by another manager. In this case, the manager delegates their My Tasks items to a second manager who is filling in, and selects their administrative assistant as the alternate delegate. When the original manager returns, they resume their own tasks.

While the manager is on vacation, the second manager (the delegate) initiates a business process that requires a step be approved by the manager who is on vacation. However, the business process definition for this step contains a routing restriction that prevents the step from being routed to the initiator of the business process. When

Apply Routing Restrictions during Delegation

is selected, the delegation that is normally routed to the second manager is instead routed to the administrative assistant (the alternate delegate). Because the second manager is also the initiator of the business process, routing restrictions prevent Workday from delegating the My Tasks item to the second manager.