Step 6: Prepare Approval and Pre-Provisioning Workflows
Approval and pre-provisioning workflows enable you to specify approvers for a service request, customize approval emails and configure automated deployment for approved requests. You can configure conditional workflow steps and use variables to access information captured during the request process.
![Approval Workflows](Images/approv-wf.png)
Design considerations
When preparing approval and pre-provisioning workflows, consider the following:
- Do you require multi-stage approval?
- What needs to happen before a VM is deployed?
- Who or what controls whether a new service request is approved — one or more individuals, quota calculations, or some other factor?
- If you configure quota limits, will you automatically reject requests that exceed quota, or will you allow approvers to make this decision?
- Does anyone need to be notified, without requiring their approval?
- Once a request is approved, should automatic deployment commence, or will an administrator manually deploy the service?
Best practices
- Create an approval process that supports your business requirements — for example, to control costs, to control service deployments, or to justify service requests.
- For software development teams, as long as their request is within quota, allow for automatic request approval. This allows IT to quickly meet the needs of the business.
- For service providers, consider how your services are sold. If sold as blocks of resources, you will use quota and notify sales teams. If sold as on-demand, all-you-can-eat, automatically approve requests to be billed at a later date.
Examples
With approval and pre-provisioning workflows, you can:
- Set up a two-stage approval process: line of business approval, followed by IT approval.
- Add a second level of approval for requests that will exceed quota. For example:
- One of your customers has configured a daily cost quota for each of their 20 organizations. If a service request is within the organization's daily cost quota, the Approval and Pre-Provisioning workflow sends an approval email to the organization manager. Service requests that will exceed that quota display a warning, notifying the requester that the request may not be approved. The request is then automatically rejected, and a notification email is sent to the requester.
- Another customer sends an approval email to one email address if the request will exceed an organization's CPU quota, and to a different email address if the request will exceed the organization's storage quota.