ISMS.online gives you the ability to set up an Approval Process for the review of policies and controls. This allows you to manage the integrity of work with a visible approval process that includes timestamps and approvers. 


Until recently the approval system only allowed for one approver for your projects. We're pleased to now be able to introduce the Approval Chain for the Projects area. This will allow you to set up multiple approvers across multiple perspectives and the ability to set different orders on a project-by-project basis if you choose to.


Here's a short video explaining the changes:





Please note, that you have to have Administer permissions in the Project to edit the order of approval.


How the chain of Approval works in practice


If your company has an internal policy in place that requires multiple people to sign off on any updates to the policy packs, you may have had to create multiple to-dos to manage multi-person approvals. 

You can set any number of approvers who must all approve the policy (in the pre-set order) before it can be completed.


How to set up a chain of Approval


For example, if we go into the ISO 27001 Policies and Controls section and select an activity (I've opened A.6.2)

Currently, if there is more than one approver listed, you can select which one will be asked to approve the activity:



1. Now if we go into project Settings (top right of the above image) and scroll down to the Approval section you can see a few new options as below.



2. The approval order is turned off by default, but you can easily enable it by checking the checkbox. After that, you can click Add Approver to select the approvers from everyone that has been assigned access.



3. This will be in the order of first to final approver (which can be adjusted later if needed, as explained further down).



4. Now when you set an activity for approval it will look like this:



All users (approvers or general users) will see this showing who it's waiting on in the approval process.


As before, Kevin will get an email notification, see an update in his activities feed, and will also be able to see this in the approval tab, which includes the approval order:



Once Kevin has approved it. 



It'll then move on for Mike and anyone else to approve in turn.

Once the final approver has done so, as before it will bring up the set reminder box (if enabled) asking when to remind the assigned user (in this case Piper).



How to edit the Approval Chain after set up


If you need to change or adjust the Approval Chain, this can be done within the same settings page as setting it up.



From here, you can drag a user to change their order, add someone or remove them from the process entirely (which will bump the people below them up in the process).



As we see here, you can drag Karen into Kevin's place, and they will swap positions in the hierarchy.

You can also remove users from the list, using the highlighted x button.


You can add, or re-add users in the same way as we did at the start.



Related Links


These are some other guides you might find useful: 


Please contact [email protected], or our live chat, if you have any questions.