We recently restructured our approval roles in Qualio to better align with our organizational changes. I updated the role assignments in the document control workflow configuration, but now several documents are stuck in the approval stage.
The workflow shows the approval task assigned to the new “Quality Director” role, but users in that role can’t see the pending approvals in their task list. I’ve verified the users are properly assigned to the Quality Director role in the user management section.
This is blocking document release for critical SOPs that need to go live this week. I’m wondering if there’s an issue with how workflow routing logic handles role assignment changes mid-flight, or if user-role mapping needs time to propagate through active workflows. Any insights on getting these approvals unstuck?
From an audit perspective, manual reassignment should be fine as long as the audit trail shows: (1) who approved, (2) what role they held at approval time, and (3) documentation of why the reassignment was needed. I’d recommend adding a comment to each document explaining the role restructuring and manual reassignment to maintain transparency for future audits.
When you change role assignments in an active workflow, existing workflow instances don’t automatically pick up the new roles. They’re locked to the role configuration that existed when the workflow started. You’ll need to either reassign those specific approval tasks manually or restart the workflows with the new role configuration.
Another thing to check - did you verify that the users in the Quality Director role have the correct permissions for document approval? Sometimes role assignment validation passes but the underlying permissions aren’t properly configured. Go to the Quality Director role settings and confirm it has ‘Approve Documents’ permission enabled. Also check if there are any workflow stage restrictions that might be filtering out these users even though they’re in the right role.
Thanks both. I don’t see a ‘refresh workflow roles’ option in the UI. If I manually reassign these approvals to specific users, will that create audit trail issues? We need to show that approvals were done by the appropriate role, not just by individuals.
I’ve dealt with this before. The issue is that workflow routing logic captures role definitions at workflow initiation, not dynamically. Check if Qualio has a ‘refresh workflow roles’ option for in-progress approvals. Some QMS systems allow you to force a role re-evaluation without restarting the entire workflow. If not, you might need to manually reassign each stuck approval to specific users rather than relying on the role assignment.