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Process documentation Approving a Phase  Locate the document in its SAP Library structure

Purpose

Approvals are part of phases in a project. They document that goals were attained during a phase which are required for the successor phases or for completing a project. However, your system administrator can configure the settings in Customizing for Collaboration Projects so that no approval is necessary. You do this under Define Phase Types.

The approval is made by any number of decision makers, defined by the project leader. The decision makers grant or reject the individual approval based on the approval document. This document contains all approval-relevant information and cannot be changed at this point. The decision makers can sign a document independently of one another and in any order.

The system uses signatures for individual approvals to ensure that the decision has actually been made by the correct decision maker:

·        Normally, you enter the password for your user.

·        When you use signatures with user certificates, the system assigns digital signatures using the private key of the user certificate. There is no need to enter a user and password.

The phase can only be ultimately approved if all individual approvals have been granted, that is, unless your system administrator has made different settings. Once a phase has been approved you can begin processing the following phase. An approval cannot be withdrawn once it has been granted. After the approval, the maintenance of data for a phase is limited. For example, you can only confirm tasks that are not relevant to the approval. The phase is formally completed once it has the status  Completed. From then on you cannot change the phase data.

Once the last phase has been approved, you can complete the project.

Process Flow

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       1.      The project leader creates an approval.

       2.      The project leader begins the approval.

       3.      The decision makers grant their individual approvals or reject them.

       4.      The project leader rejects the approval of the phase, if appropriate..

       5.      The project leader begins the approval again.

       6.      The project leader grants the approval of the phase.

Until the phase has been approved, the project leader can cancel the approval at any time.

 

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