Workflow Overview and Access

 

The responsibility for the creation and modification of workflow steps belongs to a designated group of users that support the protocol submission and review process.  Aside from required modifications to the workflows, any errors that may result from an application progressing through workflow must be able to be monitored and recovered.  If a person is incorrectly assigned a task, there is a means to forward this task to the correct person.  All of these functions can be performed on the following Insight pages found under Humans or Animals Management within the Admin module; Workflow Management, Workflow Admin Activity and Workflow Errors.

 

Several different groups of users have access to the workflow functionality including the study staff, various department officials and the protocol office.  Two types of access to the workflow exist, namely access to update the workflow and access to simply view it.  All users who have read access to a protocol application in workflow will have access to track its progress.  All users who are part of the protocol administrators group are implicitly given read access when the application is submitted.

 

Those users who need to interact with a given workflow are determined by a combination of the workflow’s configuration and the specifics of the individual application.  In addition, various consistent parties, who might be required to certify all applications for a given department and application type, are determined in advance and automatically assigned to the workflow.  Parties dependent on the specifics of the application, such as the members of the study staff, are determined dynamically, as per the assignments made during the application preparation phase.

 

Users only viewing the workflow, but not interacting with it, such as new submission administrators or committee members, are typically not explicitly associated with a specific workflow.  Their access is derived from the assets to which they are granted access to through Insight security.

 

The support staff holds responsibility for maintaining the workflow definitions, and permissions follow directly from the means support uses to provide this maintenance (e.g. a separate application) with a single permission level.

 

Access must be available to all users wishing to track items in the system.  In general, access granted by this module will be ‘read-only’.  In some cases, users are provided with a level of update, such as the ability for protocol administrators to lock and unlock protocol applications.

 

Only users staffed on a particular protocol application are allowed to view and print the Certification form associated with that protocol.  Only users with protocol rights are able to gain the additional functionality to preview and email Certification forms for all protocol-application staff members.