Troubleshoot approvals in business projects

If you’re having problems setting up approvals for your team-managed business project, this page can help you troubleshoot the setup process.

Set up transitions for your workflow before you can set up approvals

You’ll need to set up transitions for your statuses for approvals to work properly. The reason this needs to be set up correctly is so you can identify a status destination for when a work item is approved or declined.

Ideally, your approved transition progresses the work item to the next stage in the workflow or Done. The declined transition destination should go back to a status so that the assignee (or person who has requested approval) can review why the work has been declined.

Once you’ve set up transitions for your workflow, you’ll need to:

1. Select the status you’re triggering an approval from in the workflow.

2. Select the plus icon next to the approvals section in the right sidebar.

When ‘any status’ is applied to your approval status

You can still set up your approval and apply it to your workflow, however if you have the ‘any status’ transition applied to the status your work item will move to once approved, your approval process can be bypassed. It means that you can move a work item from any status to the approved status, bypassing the entire approval process.

To make sure that you don't skip any steps in the workflow and that work doesn't proceed without approval, you need to set up proper transitions between your statuses. How to manage work item transitions

Be sure to remove ‘any status’ transition applied to the status you’re triggering an approval from to avoid it from making your approval process redundant. There are a few ways to remove the ‘any status’ from a status:

• Select the ‘any status’ lozenge in your workflow and select the Delete transition button at the bottom right of the screen, or press delete or backspace on your keyboard.

• Select the status your work item will move to once approved, then in the right sidebar, deselect ‘Allow work items in any status to move to this one’.

Approver fields

The approver field needs a different name for each approval process that's set up.

The field is a multi-select user field that stores the list of approvers and responses. If you have multiple approval steps in a workflow, you cannot share the same field. For each approval step, you’ll need a distinct name so the field can store the list of approvers and their response for each step.

Give each approval that you’re setting up a unique name. In workflows with multiple approval steps, you’ll need a distinct name for each step so the field can store the distinct respective approvers and their responses.

Preset approvers can be changed by those with edit access to the work item

Anyone in the project with Edit any work item access can manage preset approvers from the work item. How to manage approvers