Plan the routes your workflow application must handle.
An approval screen is only one part of a workflow application. The harder questions are who receives the work, which decision moves it forward, and what happens when the normal route cannot continue. AlphaTales helps you make those paths explicit before they become application requirements.
Define the work moving through the system
A workflow application coordinates a piece of work across people and states. It might handle operational requests, reviews in an internal portal, or a sequence of approvals. Start by naming the record being processed, the event that begins the work, and the outcome that ends it.
Then define who can act at each stage. Viewing a record, editing it, approving it, and reopening it are different permissions. A diagram that simply says “review” does not yet tell a developer which of those actions to build.
Include the route that does not reach approval
A returned request needs an owner and a next action. A rejection needs a clear outcome. An unavailable reviewer may need a substitute. Decide which exceptions belong in the first release and how the team will handle any that remain outside it.
Together, the usual path and its exceptions describe what the application must support. Review the roles, rules, and expected outcomes before building it.
Plan the steps and the paths between them.
- Roles and steps
- Rules and exceptions
- Expected outcomes
Review the proposed workflow in AlphaTales
AlphaTales prepares application workflow groups and individual flows using available planning context. Your team reviews the roles, steps, rules, exceptions, and outcomes, then confirms the workflows in scope. Check them with the people who carry out the work, including whoever handles cases that get stuck.
The Foundation review supplies the broader business context and responsibilities. Keep that context consistent with the detailed flow: a role should not gain approval authority merely because a generated step assigned it a task. Correct the proposed behaviour before confirming it.
Turn each transition into a requirement you can check
Once the workflow is agreed, feature specifications can describe the behaviours needed to support it. Review functional requirements, acceptance scenarios, data and states, permissions, and edge cases. For a returned request, specify who can edit it, what happens to the previous review, and how it re-enters the queue.
Also decide which systems participate. If another system must be updated, describe the information exchanged and the behaviour when that update fails. AlphaTales helps prepare these planning decisions; it is not the runtime executing your future approval workflow.
Test the path and the responsibility together
Walk representative cases through the planned application with the process owner and implementation team. Check a normal completion, a return for correction, and a case someone is not authorised to approve. The expected result should include both the saved state and the person who owns the next action.
Use the reviewed workflow and selected feature specifications in the developer handoff. Developers still build and test the routing, access controls, integrations, and history. If the process is still spread across email and documents, first establish the existing handoffs before designing more automation.
See how workflows are reviewed in AlphaTales
Discuss your workflow application
Bring one real example, the people involved, and the decisions your team still needs to make.
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