Overview
By default, the “Owner approval for KPI value updates” setting in the Scorecards panel of Application Administration is “Not required”, and all KPI updates take effect immediately. To require a KPI's owners to approve its new values, choose “1 level”. To have values approved by a chain of up to four approvers in turn, choose “2 levels”, “3 levels”, or “4 levels”.
When approval is required, updates to KPIs that have owners go into an approval queue. The owners who need to approve a value receive an alert, and they approve or reject it on the “Approve KPIs” page in the Home section.
You can approve or reject all pending updates in your queue by clicking on one of the “all” buttons on the top of the list and then clicking Save.
You can also select individual updates to be approved or rejected.
If a KPI has no owners other than the person who updated it, the update doesn't go into the approval queue and takes effect immediately.
Approving through multiple levels
With “1 level”, any one of a KPI's owners can approve or reject a new value. With two or more levels, a value moves up a chain of approvers. It must be approved at every level that has owners before it takes effect. If it's rejected at any level, it's discarded and the KPI keeps its previous value.
You assign each KPI's owners to levels on the KPI's Edit tab, using the “Approval Level” column of the Owners panel. Here, a value submitted by the updater Dana Whitfield needs four approvals before it takes effect: Marsha Mello first, then Priya Shah, then Tom Becker, and finally Elena Ruiz.
A level can have several owners, and any one of them can approve or reject the value at that level. Only the owners at the level a value has reached are alerted about it and see it on their “Approve KPIs” page. A level is skipped if it has no owners. It's also skipped if its only owners are the person who submitted the value, or someone who already approved it at an earlier level.
Wherever a KPI's owners are listed together, such as the KPI's info dialog, the KPIs tab, and scorecard reports, each owner shows their level, like “Priya Shah (Level 2)”.
To assign owners to a level across many KPIs at once, see the Editing Multiple Scorecard Items at Once article.
Seeing where a value stands
When a value needs approval at two or more levels, a label such as “Approval 2 of 4” shows how far it has progressed. Approvers see it on the “Approve KPIs” page.
Updaters see it on the “Update KPIs” page in the Home section and next to the pending value on a KPI's update form. Changing a pending value starts the approval process over from the beginning.
Click the label to see the whole chain: who submitted the value, which levels have approved it and who approved it, and which levels are still to come. A level that was skipped is marked “Auto-skipped — no approver required”. You still approve and reject values on the “Approve KPIs” page.
Rejections after earlier approvals
Sometimes a value is rejected after it was already approved at an earlier level. When that happens, everyone who approved it gets an alert explaining that the value was rejected after they approved it. The person who submitted the value is alerted too.
Changing the number of levels
If you lower the number of levels, Spider Impact asks you to confirm before it removes owners assigned to the levels that no longer exist. If a change to the levels or to a KPI's owners would leave a pending value with nobody who can approve it, Spider Impact lists the affected values. Resolve those approvals before you save the change.
Previewing the results of pending updates
When you're approving KPI values on the “Approve KPIs” page, the “Preview Results” button shows what will happen if you save your pending approvals and rejections. With more than one approval level, it shows the effect of the values once they're fully approved.
Clicking this button shows a dialog telling you what will happen if your pending approvals and rejections are saved. Each row represents a calculated KPI value affected by the pending updates. The far right column shows you which of the pending updates is affecting that calculated value. As you can see, hovering over the info icon shows the details of the pending updates.
This ability to preview results allows a KPI owner to have full visibility into what will happen if KPI value updates are approved.