Workflows Triggering Workflows
Completed
Hello,
Podio is amazing and has great potential. One of the largest issues we have with it right now is the inability of workflows to trigger another workflow. A primary reason for needing something like this is reoccuring items in apps. The reoccuring item you have does not fit our need since it creates a new item when the time elapses, not when it's marked complete.
Being able to have one workflow trigger another would fix many issues we are currently having in your platform.
Context: We are a digital advertising agency looking to use Podio for all task management.
-
Official comment
This is possible in Podio Premium today with our advanced workflow automation:
https://workflow-automation.podio.com/
/Sara
Comment actions -
Hi Curtis,
We agree that this would be great to have, though it is a complex issue to solve. We currently don't support workflows triggering workflows because this could end up with an infinite loop, with workflows triggering each other infinitely.
That being said, we are looking into ways around it. Thanks for your input!
/Jacquelyn - Podio
-
Would this sort of thing work for you? We use this in our office but I don't implement it so can't help much more than that.
-
Just to add to Curtis' suggestion, workflows triggering workflows would significantly help me make my work more productive and I don't think there are any workflows in my chains that would make them run infinitely. Perhaps there's a way to test for that and to prohibit workflows from causing that infinite loop?
In addition, though, there is a glitch caused by NOT having workflows triggering other workflows. For instance, I have an app called "Member & Leads Backlog" in which I collect all of the important information I have from members and leads, including the date of "Last Contact" and "Next Contact." Within this app is a category field that describes when I should next contact the member/lead --contact immediately (1 day), phone tag (2 days), follow up (7 days), check in on occasion (15 days), and let it be for now (30 days). I created an automatic workflow to trigger the next contact date to reflect this category field.
In other apps that I use to reach out to my members & leads I have workflows in which the date of those interactions are then reflected in the "Last Contact" field in my Member & Leads backlog app. However, since a change in that field would normally trigger the workflow I shared in the above paragraph and Podio does not support workflows triggering other workflows, what happens is that the category choice of when I should next contact my Member/Lead is REMOVED. This is an unacceptable result because then I would lose track of when I need to next contact my Member/Lead. Thus, I cannot use the workflow functionality at all even though it was one of the reasons why I signed up for the paid Podio package.
Is it possible to re-think how workflows triggering workflows would be possible given the fact that not doing so might have severe consequences for the ways in which I can effectively use Podio.
-
Is this problem still being considered, or is it pretty low on the priority list? I think the work-a-round is to copy all of the workflows all the way up the chain, so the top has all of the work-flows, the 2nd tier has an aggregate of all below it, and so on. I think I can get it to work, but it is going to be a lot more setup, and will have to manually propagate any updates throughout the chain. If you ever turn on WTW (workflows triggering workflows), it would create a mini flood for a second but I would gladly clean it up and deduplicate my workflows to have this ability. One of my main use cases. Add Employee >> which Adds 20+Inventory Items (laptop, software, etc) >>which Adds Training Items for many of the Inventory items. To get it to work, Ill have to try adding all of the workflow logic for creating Inventory and Training up in the Employees app. Still love Podio.
-
I have been able to build in a workaround in the meantime, although it's not nearly as elegant as I would like. What I've done is basically add the secondary workflow into the first workflow. To do this, I've had to add relationship fields in the primary app to the downstream apps where the workflows would normally reside. Luckily, we have the ability to always hide the fields now, so this makes the primary app less cumbersome to work in. Again, not beautiful, but functional.
-
Saw this get bumped... Want to let you know about two different workarounds.
The first being a more annoying way to do it. We essentially created a start/stop button that would fire pending workflows that meet certain criteria. This was effective for a little bit but wasn't the most effective.
The second option is what we use now... Globiflow http://www.globiflow.com/. It allows you to make workflows fire workflows and honestly... A LOT more. It's been a great asset to using Podio and I've managed to build some pretty dang complex workflows, essentially using Podio as a time clock management system for tasks.
Please sign in to leave a comment.
Comments
7 comments