Policy approvals
Policy approval is an important part of the policy management life cycle. Leadership approval gives a policy the authority to govern how an organization operates. When a policy is updated, it typically needs to be approved again. During the approval process, many organizations struggle to capture feedback and create evidence of approval. Hyperproof has an approval workflow to streamline the approval process.
When a Draft policy document is ready for final approval, the policy owner or manager moves that version of the document to the Approval stage to have it go through an approval process. Changing the policy version stage starts the request for Approval process where you assign one or more approvers, create approval tasks, and set a due date for those tasks.
The approval process for a policy is as follows:
The owner or manager of the policy changes the stage of a policy version from Draft to Approval.
Hyperproof launches a Request for approval that is configured by the owner or manager with the list of approvers and the due date. See Initiating a policy approval.
Hyperproof creates a parent approval work item that tracks the overall approval workflow and the status of each individual approver. Hyperproof also creates separate approval tasks for each approver. The approver's tasks are linked to the parent approval work item. You can access all approvals for a policy from the Approvals tab.
The ID of the parent approval task displays on the Details and Versions tabs for the policy. That ID is a link to open the parent approval work item to see details on the progress of the approval workflow. The parent approval task can also be accessed from the Approvals tab in Work Items.
Hyperproof sends a notification to each approver containing a link to their approval task and the due date. Approvers must be logged in to Hyperproof to access their approval tasks or they are asked to log in when they click the task link in the notification. See Policy notifications.
Approvers that regularly log in to Hyperproof can also find their approval tasks by navigating to Work Items > Approvals.
Approvers open their approval tasks where they can read the policy document and approve it or request a change. If a change is requested, the approver must add comments pertinent to the change request. The approval task also contains a share link containing the policy name and ID, allowing the approver to add their feedback directly to the document. See Approving or requesting a change to a policy.
Hyperproof sends a notification to the policy owner for each approval or change request. See Policy notifications.
If the version of the policy document has a change request, the owner or manager of the policy changes the stage of the policy version back to Draft and addresses the issues that caused the document to require changes. Owners review feedback by opening the parent approval work item, accessing individual approval tasks, and reading the comments. Comments added directly in the document must be reviewed there. See Managing a policy approval marked Change requested.
When all issues have been addressed, the owner or manager of the policy changes the stage of the policy document to Approval, and the process begins again. A new parent approval task and associated tasks for approvers are created.
When all approvers have approved the policy version, it is marked Approved on the Edit details and Versions tabs. Hyperproof generates proof of the approvals and automatically attaches it to the affected version. See Managing a policy approval marked Approved.