In Formwork, you can send out various “things” for review: Documents, Records and Change Requests. The common theme with all of these is that you don’t select a certain person who should review it; instead, you select reviewers by roles. Let’s see what that means!
As an example, here’s how it looks when you start sending out a document for review:
So the big elephant in the room is: Who the hell is this “CEO” dude?
You can find out the answer by navigating to Reviewer Roles in Formwork, it’s in the left menu in the QMS section. When you click on it, it looks like this:
You can see a list of all reviewer roles and which people belong to them. For example, the CEO role only has one member, that’s me! The Software Developer role, on the other hand, has two members – Ale Solano and Saurabh Sikchi. Cool.
So now we’ve solved the mystery of what happens when you send out a review to the CEO role – it ends up in my inbox, and it’s displayed on my Formwork dashboard.
Let’s see how you can create new roles.
Creating New Roles
Creating new roles is simple. Click on “+ New” in the top right corner, and you’re greeted with this screen:
Most of these things are self-explanatory. The most important fields are Title (name of the role) and People Working In This Role.
Another cool fields is the Select Trainings […] field at the bottom. It’s optional, but super useful! You can select trainings which people in this role typically should go through. That will save you a lot of time later when managing your employee trainings in the Trainings section in the left menu 🙂
Hit Save and that’s it! You’ve just created a new role which you can now use for your future reviews.
A few important notes:
- If a role contains more than one user, reviews to that role are sent out to all users in the role. However, it’s sufficient if one user of the role approves the review.
Example: I send something out for review to the “Software Developers” role which contains two users. They both get a notification. If one of them approves the review, their side of the review is done – the other software developer no longer has to do anything. - You can, of course, send something out for review to multiple roles. Each role has to approve your review for the item to get approved.
Example: I send something out for review to “Software Developers”, which contains two users, and “CEO”, which contains one user. Both software developers and the CEO get notified. If one of the software developers approves the review, the “Software Developers” side of the review is approved, i.e. the other software developer no longer has to do anything. But the review is still incomplete because the CEO has to approve. Once the CEO has approved, the review is finally approved.
