Understanding Request Delegation

When request approvers and committers mark themselves as out of the office to take themselves out of the request workflow (see Setting Your Preferences), they can assign a request delegate to approve or commit requests for them.

The delegate must have the appropriate permissions to view content and approve or commit requests (see Security for Requests). The system does not automatically assign them the necessary permissions to view and take action on requests. If the delegate has permissions on the data objects in a request but not the view, they can approve the request using the request inspector.

Request delegates are handled as follows:

• When the invitation to approve or commit a request is sent to the approver or committer, an invitation is also sent to the delegate.
• The delegate can perform the approve and commit tasks on behalf of the out of office user.

  Note:

  Both the original invitee and the delegate remain invited to the request, but only one of them can approve. When one of them approves, the other is removed from the invitee list. However, the system marks the out of office invitee as a request participant so that they can access the request at a later point in time.
• When the delegate approves or commits a request, the invitee table on the Workflow tab in the request inspector displays the user details on whose behalf the delegate was invited. See Inspecting Requests.
• If a delegate is the same user for multiple out of office approvers or committers, or if the delegate is also an invitee on the request, the delegate is sent only one invitation to approve or commit.
• If the delegate is also out of the office, the request is escalated to a user with Data Manager permission to break the deadlock.