Managing parallel subtasks and subprocesses in CMW Tracker

When designing a workflow in CMW Tracker you will notice that you can design workflows of any complexity but there is always just one process step that can be active at a time. In other words, you can create branched processes but users will always have to choose one single step to move the current process to.

This is in line with the current product philosophy which assumes that a process cannot reside in two different steps at the same time. Allowing users to take several different workflow branches at the same time would mean blurring the responsibility and make workflow management less efficient. Designing workflows with consecutive steps all along will make them more logical, controllable and transparent. Understanding this concept may help you design any workflows appropriately but what if you need several tasks to be completed by different people to complete a certain stage of a process?

There are several ways of achieving that:

• CMW Tracker allows you to create several tasks and assign them to different people at any single step in a workflow. This article describes how to set that up.
• Consider creating a consecutive chain of workflow steps. In other words, instead of creating several tasks at once, set up several steps in a row and take them one-by-one, with different task assignees at each step. Imagine you need 4 of your managers to approve a document before it goes on to the signing stage. It may seem logical to assign 4 tasks to all of them at the same time but if one of them doesn't approve it, the other 3 will have wasted their time on reviewing the document because it will still go back to the writer for fine-tuning. In this case it may be more efficient to create 4 consecutive steps so your managers hand the document over to each other after approving it. It may take more time but in most cases this method is more efficient. This article describes the process of creating a workflow in more detail.