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ronen_weisz
Active Contributor

Well the simple answer will be yes, of course, this is a great way of been up to date with the changes in the employee positions in the company, when an employee changes position he/she is automatically no longer linked to the workflow and his/hers replacement is. If you don't use it the workflow admin will always have to create user assignments manually and you will probably have an easier time explaining to an inspection team asking "Why was user 'A' the approver of this workflow?!" if he is the holder of an appropriate position.

But there is another side to this issue, let me give an example to explain: In a big organization I worked for, the company's management decided to make a major organizational change in the HR structure of the company, splitting the company to 3 new divisions, this caused 50 high ranking positions to be shifted or replaced by new ones and all the purchasing workflows to be stuck for a day or two while we figured out what had happened and which new positions are to be new workflow approvers...

Well you can say that this is actually a communication problem, the HR admins should have informed the workflow team in time and the whole problem would have been avoided. True, but still something to pay attention to, the HR admin might not always know he/she is effecting workflow processes.

And I want to make it a bit harder for the HR side:

A position might have to be delimited in a specific date, but the person holding it still has the same rule in the workflow process, simply in a new position.

Sometimes the position is the correct one but there is no person linked to it, for example the manager holding the position retired, there is now an ongoing selection process for a new manager which isn't complete yet.

A new employee enters the company, this employee started to work and needs to be a part of a part of the workflow process, but the process of creating a new position in the company will take a few more mounts and for now he is on a temporary position.

You might want to give control of the workflow approval process to a local process admin, for example a material management team leader who needs to sometime assign a different team member to a material creation request workflow, and this team leader does not have any HR authoritarian.

So which way to go?

As you can see, the answer is not a simple one and you should look at the process and organization using it when deciding. Organizations in which the main work of HR admins is handled in other systems, process which have little to do with HR and small organizations should probably not use it. The more the organization uses HR process and the bigger it is the more I would lean towards the HR org structure, simply because there are probably more HR admins then there are workflow admins and they are better informed of changes, if you have a lot of HR workflow processes you will have to find workarounds for most of the problems I mentioned and the HR admins will have more knowledge of workflow processes .

What do you think?

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