The Magnificent Flexi Task

We all know and love the Flexi task.  It is one of the most popular workflow actions for good reason.  In this blog post, I will cover how reminders work, to ensure that you, as a workflow creator, are taking advantage of the options available. 

Reminders

Some basics. Reminders can prompt the task assignee if they have not responded to a task within a set period of time.  The reminder will continue to prompt the assignee (or group of assignees) until they have met the criteria to respond or until we run out of prompts.  Let’s check out the picture below to see what’s going on.

In this example, we are going to remind people 14 times every 4 hours. Nintex allows us to remind people every minute, though realistically, the minimum should be about every 5 minutes.  You will have some very unhappy users being reminded every minute to update a task.

I’ve set the reminders to every 4 hours in this example, but you can use the item properties or variables to set the intensity.  A good example is a maintenance request. If it’s low priority, set the variable to remind once a week. If it is a high priority, set the variable to remind once a day. I’ve reflected that choice below.

You may notice that I’m only setting the reminders to assignee’s during business hours. In order for Nintex to know what your organization’s normal business hours are, be sure to edit them here: Site settings | Site Administration | Regional Settings | Define Your Work Week.  You can also make Nintex smarter by defining holidays: Site settings | Nintex Workflow | Manage Holidays.

Escalation

For those times when reminders are not enough to get a task completed, for example, if that resource is out of the office because of illness.  There are two escalation options available to deal with this situation. You can delegate the task to someone else, or you can complete the task automatically.  The options are displayed below.

In this example the task will be completed with the outcome of Approved after 8 days.  If this executes, the assignee will receive a notification that their response is no longer required, but keep in mind the workflow history will show that they completed the task.

Just like reminders, you can set these manually or use variables.  In the example above, the task will be set to “Approved” after 8 business days.

The other option for completing this task is to delegate it. In the above example I can specify who the task goes to, in this case I’m sending the ask to the approver’s manager.  You can email the assignee when the task is escalated, by defining that in the Not Required Notification tab.