I have a question about Service Catalog approvers, which relates to an earlier post : https://pitstop.manageengine.com/portal/community/topic/set-up-approval-flow-for-service-catalog

For Stage 1 and 3 - I understand how to do this, so there is no problem here.

However For stage 2, I have a more variable requirement.

We have different levels of approval for different types of request.  So for example, if you want to have Remote Access set up, a Managing Director needs to sign this off, whereas if you want Outlook Web Access enabled, it's only a Director.

So ideally we'd configure different Service Catalog options for each request type, but require it to seek approval from different job types based on which request is selected

Let's consider a request that requires Director level approval. For example, our requester happens to report directly to their Director.  That would be easy, as we could use $REPORTING_TO$ for the Approval.

However, what if that Director happens to be on holiday / out of the office for another reason.  It needs to be possible for ANY Director to be able to approve.

Also, what if the requester does not report directly to a Director?  The $REPORTING_TO$ would seek approval from someone without the necessary job title. There doesn't seem to be a way to skip up the reporting line.

Based on your response to the above, we would probably have to go through and mark all Directors as Service Request Approvers.

The problems with this are:

1) We have a global headcount of approximately 8000. Admittedly, not all of these are directors, but it will still be a high number for a manual task

2) We would then be faced with yet another system to update when someone gets promoted.  There would undoubtedly be delays with such a manual solution, and this would hold up the approval of requests.

3) Finally, this only considers one job type. As I said above, some requests only require a Director, others require Managing Director. So we would also have to highlight all MDs as well. Also the approver list would be full of MDs and Directors for a Director level service request.

The 'Organisational Roles' option also doesn't work, as it only allows one person to be selected per role. Even if it allowed multiple people, it would still be a daily, manual task to keep up to date.

The only thing I've found that comes close to being dynamic, is "User Roles" (under Admin > Users).  You can set criteria and one of these is Job Title.  So I can create separated groups (Directors, Managing Directors, Managers etc) but I cannot see a way of linking this with Approval field in the Service Catalog templates

What I'm trying to do is cut down the work carried out by the 1st Line Technicians. Currently if someone submits a request, the Analyst first has to get to it in the queue, make a judgement on which level of authorisation it requires, contact the user and ask for, and wait for a response (via email) so that the approval is documented.  All of this takes time and effort and can delay routine tickets from being completed.  What would be ideal is that if this Approval process could work so that the ticket arrives with the Service Desk, already approved, and with the correct level of approval.