[Status: Backburner ⏳] Tasks approval via Requests + Blueprints

Thank you for sharing your workaround Gia Calvillo and welcome to the Community!

We could use this as well.  Adding an approval after the creation from the blueprint is tedious and could easily be automated at the blueprint level.  HELP PLZ!

Thanks a lot for supporting this suggestion Mark McLaughlin! YOur feedback will be passed on to our Product team 👍

Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

Lisa Wrike Team member Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

We need to create approvals when content is ready for the approver to review.  Creating from a form instantly sends them to approvers... this is a bad experience as they will have a backlog of approvals that are not actionable.

Creating from a blueprint task allows us to control WHEN the approver is notified.  Allowing presentation of finished product for approval.

The challenge is approvers are conditional.  Workflow approvals don't support conditionally adding different approvers for different situations.  We leverage user defined fields to store which groups need to be pulled in on an approval.  Then when the work item is ready for review, we need to send it to the approvers.

Thanks a lot for sharing your use case in detail Scott Powell, we'll pass your feedback to our Product team and we'll let you know if there are updates.

Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

Lisa Wrike Team member Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

I also see great value in creating an approval in a blueprint task. Now you either have to add approvals afterwards or you have multiple task workflows because you have to manipulate some of them to get the approval. The latter is not what you want, especially if you want to automate later. 

Handy would also be if you could assign a job role. In the first phase we work in our blueprint with job roles since it is not yet known for the whole project which employee will effectively perform the tasks. Through mass action the tasks of a specific role are later changed to the name of the employee and it would be handy if approval could also work this way.

Well said Scott Powell about approvers being conditional. We have a similar challenge, in which the current implementation of approvers tied to custom workflows is unusable for us. Having to list every single possible approver in each approval doesn’t work at all in our case. For us, the approver is one of 14 business managers (commented on this a year ago in another thread). We already have a user type custom field with the business manager responsible for approvals in the project, so it would be great to be able to pick the approver from that custom field. Also sort of related, Conrad Aleshire suggested adding Approvals as a trigger in the Wrike Automation Engine.

Thanks a lot for this additional feedback here, folks! I've now requested our Product team to provide a status here now that the suggestion has 60+ votes 👍

Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

Lisa Wrike Team member Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

Hi folks! We've made our team aware of all your feedback here, as well as the amount of interest for this feature. While our team doesn't have immediate plans to work on it, we'll continue to share your inputs with them and we'll let you know if there are any updates here in the future. Thank you! 

Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

Lisa Wrike Team member Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

Now following! I was really surprised to realise today this isn't possible from a Blueprint status. Wrike Lightspeed needs to hurry up!

I am a bit disappointed that this feature is not yet available considering the age of the first request and the massive following up to now. The whole aspect of saving time by building blueprints is a godsend, and not including the 'Add Approval' option in the blueprint building process is a bit of an oversight i feel. Add to that the development team 'is aware of the request but do not have this feature on their roadmap' is a letdown. I am still a new user. Only been at it with Wrike for a week and this was one of the first actions i tried to take. It's clearly a lot more important than the average Quality of Life request as far as programs go. Evidently, simply up voting a post isn't a strong enough action for the development team to make this a priority. What do we need to do for this to happen?

Hi Melissa McGroder. Shawn Hood, welcome to the Community!

Following up on the original post, may I ask if adding the approver via request form would be an option for you? You could create a single select custom field where every option represents the relevant users. When selecting one of the options in the request form, the corresponding user would be added as an approver:

Looking forward to your replies!

Hi Jaun. I don't think that would help myself and my company at this point. Unless someone has a better idea for creating a new project in our folders. As it is, Projects are created Manually because our work comes from outside the company (our clients). Then we create a folder for them in our wrike (or add a new project to their existing folder if they already have one). It would be nice to be able to add predetermined approvers to the blueprints as we can just load the blueprint and it's nested items for a project instead of making it each and every time.

Now, I am totally willing to admit that i am looking at things too closely so if you or anyone else believes that using a form would be the best way to create a new project (and or new customer folder) then i would love to hear the suggestions

Hi Shawn Hood, thank you for your reply! May I ask you if adding approvals to custom workflows would be of help in your case?

Hello, I would also really love adding approvers into blueprints. I have looked into the custom workflow and unfortunately that is just a tad too clunky for what I am trying to achieve whereas adding approvers who are the same for each time this task is generated is the perfect fix for me :)

Thanks!

Hi Anna Bihari, thank you for sharing your feedback, I've passed it on to our Product Team 👍 Please, rest assured that we will keep you informed if any changes are implemented.

If there is anything else we could help with, please don't hesitate 🙂

This really needs to be added, Monday had this implemented and I imagine it would be incredibly easy to implement.

Hello Carson Ward, welcome to the Community 🙂 Thank you for chiming in, I have passed your comment on to our Product Team. I understand this would be an important feature for you and your team and we will keep you updated in case there are any improvements regarding this option.

Please, allow me to mention that you can check our New to Community forum to discover all the resources you can find in our Community 🙂

If you have any additional questions, please let us know.

Our organization is new to Wrike and I'm in the process of setting up our blueprints and workflows. I've hit a major jaw-drop moment of realization that I can't add approvals to blueprints. Had this been known in advance, I'm not sure we would have continued with Wrike. It seems building in approvals in workflows is best used when approval processes are consistent. This isn't the case for us. For example, when we manage events, there are countless tasks and sub-tasks that require unique approvals depending on the deliverables. I can't expect our team members to set up projects using blueprints and have to manually add in approvals for all deliverables every time they pull the event management blueprint. This would be very time-consuming at the start of each project and leave a lot of room for error. One of the main reasons we are adopting project management software is to streamline the approval process. Please raise the request to add approvals to blueprints as a high priority. This is a real oversight. In the meantime, please provide suggested workarounds for this issue. I'll need to figure out a way around this before rolling it out to the team.

Hi Trisha Garrity, welcome to the forums 👋 Thanks a lot for sharing such detailed feedback with us!

One thing I'd like to suggest is adding approvals to your workflows, so that you can automatically create an approval in a task, folder, or project when the status is changed. Here's a Knowledge base article that walks you through this, can you please check it our and let me know if it can work for your team? 

Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

Lisa Wrike Team member Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

Is there an update on this? The original request was in 2019... I do recognize the ability to workaround this by creating a workflow but in a space where there are already lots of workflows, I don't necessarily want to create a new one just to work around this.

Hi Greg Hao, thank you for chiming in. Regarding the suggestions of the original post:

• Add possibility to add predefined approvers from Blueprints.
  
  I'm afraid this is still not possible.
  
  
• Add possibility to add approvers from check-boxes and drop-downs in requests. 
  
  You can achieve this by using conditional approvals in request forms:

Please, feel free to share more details about your use case so we can provide you with an accurate reply 🙂

Thank you!

Hi! I am also quite deceived we cannot add an approver in the blueprints. Having a request form to fill defeats the purpose of having a blueprint with all information pre populated. Please keep us updated on the development on this item. Thanks!

Hi Annie A Arsenault, welcome to Wrike Community 👋

Thank you for reaching out and supporting this idea! I'll now share your feedback with the responsible Product team.

We don't have updates at the moment, but we'll let you know if we have any news here in the future. Be sure to upvote the original post above as votes show our team the amount of interest for different suggestions here. Here's a post that explains about voting and statuses in the Product Feedback forum 👍

Let me know if you need help with anything 🙋

Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

Lisa Wrike Team member Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

Hello - chiming in that this functionality is needed. I do not need the entire project to be approved, just a specific task. 

Hi Anna (she/her) Nguyen, thank you for chiming in; I'm afraid that this feature is not available but we will keep you updated if there are any changes 👍

I second Anna. I see folks have been asking for this feature for four years. Can I ask why the Product Development team is hesitant to implement it? Particularly now that there are so many approval options in the New Dashboards, you would think that having approvals built into tasks in blueprints would be a logical step.

There are currently 99 upvotes on this request, can we get some actual feedback from the product team instead of just "no news to share"?