Clarity

I'll apologize in advance for the newbie question, I have spent quite a bit of time searching through the docs and posts for this. 

My company is implementing Clarity and I'm lucky enough to be the Admin.  We have consultants assisting us, but we are having some "communication challenges" with them.  Could someone please guide me to the documentation on how timesheet approval process works?  At a previous company I was a resource manager and received action items and emails for my direct reports when they submitted a timesheet.  Clarity out of the box  isn't doing this and I'd like to learn how to set this up.

Many thanks.

Your best shot us just to study the OOTB Timesheet approval process looking at the steps and actions etc.

The documentation is not that comprehensive, but there are some threads in the communities

http://cookbooks.ca.com/cacppm/2013/07/12/creating-a-process-or-job-to-approve-timesheets/

Time Sheet approval process

There are many functional options available to "timesheet approval", but the OOTB one is simplest ; if your user has time-approve rights over another user and the other user submits a timesheet for approval, then, provided you have the notifications preferences set correctly for your user, then you should get a notification and provided you have email options set and configured correctly that notification should also send you an email - you then just manually approve that timesheet.

Action Item related approval is typically involved with more functionally-complex approval though (one where there are Clarity processes managing that approval workflow).

Personally I am a fan of automatic-approval processes - just let the timesheets get through into the system and worry about any 'corrections' later - but how your organisation wants to approve timesheets is something for your organisation to decide (and then your consultants should model that in Clarity).

Taking the out-of-box approval process and saving it as custom process and then making changes would be the fastest. When you navigate to Admin/processes and filter on Timesheet object, you will see the approval process. Here are a few approaches which start from least administrative effort to most administrative effort. 1. Auto approve all 2. Auto approve Employee Timesheets and send action items to PMs for Contractor Time Approval. 3. Send Approval to RM for Approval 4. Send Approval to PM for Approval 5. Send Approval to PM and then RM for approval In addition to this you may want to create a portlet (or use advanced reporting) to show time by project and Task so that it is easier for validation and governance.

Atul,

In option #2 when you say "Auto approve Employee Timesheets and send action items to PMs for Contractor Time Approval", is there a way to check the employment type (Employee or Contractor) of a resource to take the appropriate path in the process?  Because without that the process would not know which step to take.  The post condition in timesheet a process only lets you check resource type (equipment, labor, etc) but not the employment type. (at least in v13.3)

Many customers do use TImesheet Approval processes.

I too like the automatic approval process but if you are holding managers (project and or resource) accountable for the time posted you may not want to use automatic approval.

Note: Since timesheets is not an object, you cannot make a process which can be initiated manually.  This means if an attribute gets locked through the process and the process gets stuck, you cannot manually unlock  the attribue through a second unlock process.  You would need to delete the locked attribute.  There is a KB on this, but support would need to be engaged for the delete statement.

Also, when using a process you would need to determine if 1 or all approvers need to approve the action item in order for the steps to progress.  If you are using Project Manager approvals, and the resource charges to several projects and all project managers need to approve, this could hold up the approval.  There are escalation options available, but this could still hold up the approval.

If the timesheets only need resource manager approval, you could give instance or obs rights and not use a process at all.

So are you saying it is not possible to create a process where the resource manager would have to approve all of its resource's timesheets weekly?  This is a process that I am trying to create with notifications.

The way I read the answer is the you can, but there are complications and a potential issue.

If it is just one approver per resource and that approver can approve all time entries for any project that can be done with manual approval without a process - that is if don't need notifications from that.

You should be able to send notifications through action items actually independent of times sheets.

We are a small organization and the resource manager approves timesheets but no notifications are being sent. Previously notifications were turned off  and I'm trying to create process and turn notifications back on.

"Resource Manager" approval is the 'simple case' and does not (should not?) require any process to implement.

The "Resource Manager" who has timesheet-approval rights over the timesheet-submitting resource should just get an automatic notification when that (any) timesheet has been submitted for approval.  If the RM is not getting notifications then you should be checking their notification preferences (in their Account Settings/Notifications).  (None of this is process-related, it is all access-right related as mentioned above)

I have tried this and notifications are Not being sent automatically.

Hi Cloutier,

When you say notifications are not being sent automatically, are you looking at the notifications in Clarity or expecting an email notification?  Email notifications will only be sent if Clarity is configured correctly to allow this.  However the notifications within Clarity should be automatic unless an individual user has turned them off under Account Settings.

If the automatic approval notification is not being sent at all in Clarity, there is something wrong.  Please open a support ticket for that so that we can help you determine the cause.

Sincerely yours,

Jeanne Gaskill

Senior Support Engineer

CA Clarity PPM