What's a workflow?

A workflow is an organizational process, a work process that is either at the core of a business like an order entry process or that serves more of a supporting role like a process for Employee Onboarding, or a process to complete and route a purchase order. You can think of a workflow as a flowchart of actions that has a clear beginning, some sequential steps, and then an end. For example, this workflow is a small workflow designed to allow an employee to apply to be part of a management training program. First, the employee has an idea, they fill out a form, and then they submit that form to their immediate supervisor.

It could be they carry it over to their boss' desk or put it in an email, or that it's something that's completed totally electronically. After their supervisor decides whether they should accept or reject this request, they forward the form on to the HR department, and the HR department then sends a letter back to the employee, letting them know that they've either been accepted or rejected, and when the program will start if they've been accepted. It might be that there's another step as well. For example here, for some employees or for some specific management training programs, after the immediate supervisor approves this person, they then send this request on to management--move it up the chain, so to speak.

And after the manager approves, then it would be sent on to HR, and finally, the employee would receive notification. Workflows can also incorporate parallel branches. This one is a little more complex. Here we have an employee creating a presentation that will be used at the company's annual meeting. So, here they are working away creating the presentation. They send it to the marketing department where it goes through a buff up. It's all nice and clean now. But three different people need to sign off on it after the marketing department has worked with it. We have the Chief Financial Officer, the CEO, and the Chief Operations Officer, all of them need to sign off on it.

And they don't need to do it in any particular order, as a matter of fact, putting them in order might create a slowdown. For example, if the CEO is out of town, but the CFO could be looking at it, it makes more sense to allow the CFO to simply work with it. So, we have these steps in parallel, three signatures necessary, but they can happen in any order. Finally, after all of these folks have signed off on it, they will send it to the IT department, and the IT department will post it on the web page where it's available for the meeting.

Whether or not there is parallel branches in a workflow, the workflow still proceeds from the start through the series of steps to the final action here at the end. Regardless of the number of steps in your workflow or the type of workflow you have, all workflows have one thing in common. Every time you want to interact with users, you'll need to present them with a form to allow them to give you information or for you to provide information to them. So, the final way you can think of workflows is a workflow is an outline of a business process that contains forms for user interaction and logic to drive the steps in between.

We'll spend this course learning to develop workflows.