Creating a Process Workflow with Google Spreadsheets

I thought I'd share this ongoing project I've been working on about creating workflow support for a team. I've referred to it before in a blog post called Using Spreadsheets Instead of Forms, in which I argue how using the commenting, "live saving", versioning and collaborative features of spreadsheet far exceeds what can be done with a simple Google Form (see below). This is especially so when the data you are collecting is long and complicated. ( Tip of the hat to Tim Saunders who had this idea ).

Having quickly trialled and liked bespoke workflow apps like Kissflow, and also read the documentation for bigger workflow systems like RunMyProcess, we realised that one of our first challenges was to define the mood or tone of this process. It was clear that the process we were trying to support was more consultative and discussion-based than a hard passing of numbers and approvals in a clear process flow. Our process needed to be more about "letting the right people know where they are up to" and asking for input than a mechanistic model.

As we worked we realised that the flow itself was remarkably simple and was mainly about making documents available to people for commenting and letting teams of people know what the status is.

We realised that we could break most stages of the process into simple interactions and added them to the spreadsheet as menu items, for example, "Submit initial request" or "Submit to Team B" or "Reject request" etc.

These menu items do three things:

• Show a dialog telling the user what they were about to do
• Sent emails to the relevant people and groups
• Updated the project's status in a central spreadsheet

And to help us to speed up the process of development, we created a Processes spreadsheet that looks like this...

Each process gets rendered against the NamedRanges in the spreadsheet, so that {MainContact} becomes "Joanne Blogs" or whatever. Sometimes, even emails are rendered this way like {HeadOfDepartmentEmail} in the CC of the email that gets sent out.

Some special values had to be sneaked in such as {folder_link} and {link} which means that emails can contain links to the current document or GDrive folder.

Working this way has meant that fine-tuning who gets sent what is a LOT quicker, it not being hard-coded. It makes the authoring of those automatic emails which usually get sent to groups rather than people so that people can easily turn off email notification if need be. 

The menu items typically have code that look something like this...

function utc_approved( url ){
  if (is_a_member_of( "planning-utc-controllers@york.ac.uk" ) == true ){
    run_process( "Process:10", url )
    set_status("UTC approved")
  }else{
    Browser.msgBox("Not allowed", "You need to be a member of the UTC controller group to run this", Browser.Buttons.OK_CANCEL)
  }
  Browser.msgBox("UTC approved" )
}

... and the run_process() function simply shows a dialog, renders and sends out emails and sets the status of the request. Some menu items have code that moves a folder to an "Archived" folder for tidiness sake, but nothing too complicated.

I think the thing I learned from this project, once again, is that, like Booking Systems, although they always present themselves at the door as a the same thing, they are always in a clever disguise and really are something very, very different indeed. And by the time they've got through the door and taken their coat off it's already too late.

By: Unknown On 3:40 AM

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Improving Ethics Approval in Research With Google Forms and Spreadsheets

I have just met with a colleague who is using Google Forms to improve the Ethics Approval process for research projects. They are taking a slightly different path to the one I might have plumped for, and are creating, on-the-fly Google Documents, filling in the appropriate sections and then sending them to people to add comments to etc.

We thought he may have worked himself into a corner because although there is a function to capture when people submit a form ( onFormSubmit() ), there isn't one to capture if you "allow the user to edit responses" - there's no onFormUpdate().

We created a workaround by having a time-based trigger that just checks to see if the updated_timestamp is greater than the last_checked_timestamp.

The best part, for me, of working with my colleague was when I referred at some point to my JavaScript skills being far from honed and he asked "So is this JavaScript then?" and laughed incredulously. He was happily coding away without even knowing what language he was coding in. Brilliant.

One thing I'm starting notice over the last few weeks and months is how many people are working on processes... and/or process improvement. I keep meeting people with visual flow charts of their ideal worlds.  I wonder how far we should encourage Google Apps hacking ( where you potentially can get almost exactly what you want ) or whether we should be looking at tools that explicitly handle processes, like RunMyProcess ( shown below ) which even have their own tools to design your workflows and a gazillion integration plugins.

But then there's also an overlap with CRM and service desk applications. In most cases there's just stuff that requires stuff to happen that involves people to do stuff - which is pretty much what a CRM might do isn't it?

So, I'm wondering, given that I keep coming across people interested in creating workflows, should I be looking into a workflow lite app or heavyweight state of the art workflow system? Or should we keep crafting ( or crufting ) our own version?

By: Unknown On 7:43 AM

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