Requiring approvals prior to publishing Action Flows
Many of our larger teams choose to enable our Approvals feature, which prevents Action Flows from being published until internal approvals have been recorded in the Workbench.
Approvals is an optional feature that you need to activate and configure for your environment before use. Our customer success team can help you set this up quickly, or you can follow the configuring approvals article.
How Approvals work
A new step in your publishing workflow
When enabled, Atomic displays a new mandatory step in the publishing workflow for your environment. In the Action Flow dashboard you'll see new information about the approval status of each Action Flow, and within the Action Flow editor, an Approve tab will be visible which displays which approvals are required before the current draft can be published, and allows approvers to record their approval.
An 'approval' is simply where a workbench member who belongs to a relevant permissions group, has checked a box indicating that they, on behalf of the permission group they are in, approve the current Action Flow draft. If an approval is required from more than one group, the draft action flow cannot be published until all approvals are received.
When configuring approvals, you'll decide how many groups should be required to give approval and configure which workbench members belong in each of those groups.
One approval is required, per approval group
It's common for teams to require approvals from more than one group in their business (e.g. one from legal, one from the data team, one from marketing etc). Atomic lets you configure approvals to require any number of approvals, and to configure the approval groups however you need. Once set up, at least one approver from each approval group must approve every Action Flow before it can be published.
Requiring someone other than the requester
Prevent the requester approving is in beta and may be subject to change. Please contact us to provide feedback.
Your environment can also be set up so that the member who submits an Action Flow for approval is never the one who approves it. This is useful where your business needs a clear separation between the person who prepares a change and the person who signs it off.
When this is turned on, the member who submitted the draft sees an explanation on the Approve tab in place of the approve option, and the Action Flow waits for a different member of a required approval group. It applies to every member, including those with approval-override permissions.
See Prevent the requester approving for how to turn it on.
Requiring a different person for each group
Require approvals from distinct individuals is in beta and may be subject to change. Please contact us to provide feedback.
Where several groups must approve, a member who belongs to more than one of them can normally approve for all of them. Your environment can be set up so that each member provides at most one of the required approvals, meaning every group is signed off by a different person.
When this is turned on, an approver who belongs to several required groups chooses one group to approve for. The remaining groups then wait for somebody else, and the Approve tab explains why those groups are no longer available to them. It applies to every member, including those with approval-override permissions.
See Require approvals from distinct individuals for how to turn it on.
Overriding approvals in case of emergency
We provide the option for you to give certain workbench members special permissions that allow them to step in and provide approvals for approval groups they don't belong to. We still record who gave this overriding approval for our audit trail. Setting up team members with approval-override permissions is an important business continuity consideration, to allow Action Flows to be published when for some (exceptional) reason you don't have time to wait for the usual approvers.
Approval overrides let a member approve on behalf of a group they don't belong to. They don't let anyone approve an Action Flow they submitted themselves when Prevent the requester approving is turned on, and they don't let anyone provide more than one of the required approvals when Require approvals from distinct individuals is turned on.
Submitting an Action Flow for approval
The time to submit your Action Flow to approval is after you have created and tested it. Team members with edit access will see an option in the Action Flow editor to submit the Action Flow draft for approval. When submitted, the Action Flow will enter a read-only state, so no further changes can be made.
The editor who submitted the Action Flow for approval, should then let the approvers know there is a new configuration awaiting approval, if they have not already seen this from the Action Flows dashboard.
How approvers record approval
When approvers open the Action Flow in the workbench, they will be able to review the read-only Action Flow, and send tests. When ready, they can navigate to the Approve tab and provide their approval. Only one approver from each approval group is required to provide approval.
If your environment prevents the requester approving, the member who submitted the Action Flow will see a note on the Approve tab explaining why they can't approve it, along with who can. Any approval they recorded before the setting was turned on is shown as Not counted, and the group returns to awaiting approval.
If your environment requires approvals from distinct individuals, approvers who belong to more than one required group will find that approving for one group removes the option against the others, with a note on the Approve tab explaining why.
Checking approval status from the API
You don't have to open the Workbench to see what is waiting on approval. The List Action Flows API returns the approval status of every Action Flow in an environment, so you can build your own report of what is pending and which approval groups have signed off so far. The same information is available for a single Action Flow, and to AI assistants through the MCP Server.
Canceling an approval request
At any time, an editor can cancel an in-progress approval, for example if they need to make further changes to the draft. When ready, they can submit it again, and the approval process will start again.
Publishing an approved Action Flow
Once all required approvals have been recorded, a workbench member with publishing permissions, will no longer be blocked from publishing the approved draft. When they return to the editor, it will be clearly shown that the Action Flow has been approved and can now be published.
Let us know if you'd like to see approvals in action, or need a hand configuring them in your environment. They're quick and easy to set up, and can provide a strong control against unapproved publishing, without adding significant friction to your teams workflow