Planio is not only great for one-off projects. It really shines when it comes to recurring tasks that follow a certain workflow within your organization.
Follow along this guide to create a simple vacation approval workflow for your team members - and apply what you've learned to create your own custom workflows.
In Planio, every issue must belong to a tracker which defines its workflow. Let's look at this in more detail:
We'd like to see trackers as special issue types. An issue must belong to exactly one tracker. Task, Support incident, Software bug, or -- you guessed it -- Vacation request would be great examples for a tracker.
Issue statuses describe the different states, that an issue in Planio can have at any given moment. For instance, an issue can be Open, In progress, Waiting for review, or Closed. An issue will always have exactly one status and the status will likely change over time as people work on the issue.
Users in Planio have their own user account using which they take part in projects using one or more roles: While some users may take part as Manager, others may be regular Staff or e.g. Client. The role defines what a user can and cannot see or do in a given project. It also defines the user's workflow.
The workflow brings it all together: A workflow defines for every possible combination of tracker and role which issue statuses are available. It defines for all its tracker's issues which status changes are allowed and which issue properties are visible and/or changeable.
Say what!? This is arguably the most complex (and powerful) part of Planio, but don't worry -- we will walk you through it and you will be a workflow expert in no time!
We knew you would love this section. Dreaming of that deserted beach in the Caribbean? Let's request some vacation days and off we go.
In many companies, taking a vacation requires approval by a manager. Employees must submit a request mentioning the start and end date of the requested vacation and managers will approve or disapprove the request. Upon approval, the dates of that vacation can not be altered, and the vacation request is final. If disapproved, employees can alter their requested dates and re-request approval until -- hopefully -- they will be allowed their well-deserved days in the Caribbean.
We will now build this workflow in Planio allowing for actual vacation requests being made and approved. We will also show you how to visualise them on Planio's calendar, so you can get a great overview on who is on vacation at which point in time.
To implement this, we will create a Tracker called Vacation request, three Issue statuses called Open, Approved, and Rejected, and two Roles, called Manager and Staff.
Finally, we will tie all those together using a custom Workflow in Planio.
First things first. Let's get down to business:
The steps are similar but slightly different for the three statuses Open, Approved, and Rejected.
This one should be easy:
This is the fun part. Here is where it all comes together.
Wait, what did we just do? Have a look at the screenshots again. What we defined is:
Now, let's customize the issue form fields a bit according to the issue status.
That's enough of prep work. Let's try it out.
That's it, you're done. Your users can now use this project for your new vacation request planning workflow. In order to submit a vacation request, all they'd have to do is create a new issue. Selecting a start date and a due date will be required when creating vacation request issues and all other useless fields will be hidden.
In order to try it out for yourself and play around with it, we recommend you create two users via your avatar -> Administration -> Users that have no administrator privileges and add them as Staff and Manager to your project respectively.
(If you try it out as an administrator, don't be alarmed by the fact that you can always choose from all statuses when updating an issue. That's normal if you're an admin. Regular users will only see the statuses as defined by their workflow.)
What's up with the Calendar module we've enabled in the roles and your project, you ask yourself? Well, after adding a couple of vacation requests, check out the Calendar tab in your project. The Planio calendar will give you a nice monthly overview of all vacation requests which have been tracked.
By using a custom query, you can even create a calendar view that displays only approved vacation requests. Or create a query for your managers that shows only Open requests that have to be approved still.