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Design Approval Process

A walk-through of how to use the design approval process

Thomas Rich avatar
Written by Thomas Rich
Updated over a week ago

Setup

This walk-through assumes that an admin has set up the design approval process as outlined in Design Approval Configuration. Your lab will probably have a different configuration that is specific to its needs.

We'll assume our example lab has a two-step review process, a Team Review step, and a PI Review step:

As you can see above, the Team Review step requires 2 users to sign off on the design. After that step has occurred, a single PI (either Mike Fero or admin) will need to sign off on the design.

Starting a Review

Let's say I'm logged in as myself, Thomas Rich, and have a design I'd like to submit for review. I'll click the Submit For Review button in the "Review" panel in the side inspector:

That should bring up a dialog that looks like this:

Because the PI Review relies on the Team Review to have been completed, it's the only option to choose here. I'll select it, and choose my fellow lab workers Chris and Kyle to review the design:

After hitting Submit, we should see a few things. For one, the design will now be locked and un-editable. This prevents us from changing the design during or after another user is going over reviewing it.

You can also see above that there is a new comment in the Design Review panel with my note that the "Design is ready for review". We can click the blue dot next to the Team Review text to view the status of the review:

Reviewing a Design

I'll now log in as Kyle Craft and we can see what it looks like to be a design reviewer.

The first thing Kyle should notice is that he has a new notification:

I see the notification is telling me that I have been requested to review the design. I can hover the text of that notification, click it, and jump to the design:

Kyle needs to look over the design and decide between 3 possible actions, Reject, Request Change, and Approve. If he Rejects the design, the design approval is effectively stopped unless something causes him to reverse that decision.

The submitter can always leave a reply on a Rejection comment asking for additional details.

Requesting Changes

Let's say instead Kyle doesn't like something about the design and chooses to request changes to it:

You'll note that a few things happened. First, there's a new comment by Kyle in the stack with a note that he'd like to see another option for the backbone. Also, note that the design is no longer locked so the design can be fixed as per the reviewer's request.

Fixing Requested Changes

Let's log back in as Thomas and add another option for the vector backbone. We'll see that a new notification has appeared:

I'll click it and jump to the design:

We see Kyle's new comment and that the status of the request is now a Yellow Hammer indicating that changes have been requested.

I'll go ahead and add a new backbone and alert Kyle that I've done so:

Here's the new backbone:

And here's my new reply to Kyle's review:

Adding a Reviewer

Let's imagine that I've also heard that the other reviewer, Chris, is out on vacation this whole week and that if I want my design reviewed soon I'll need to add another reviewer. I'll hit the Plus button next to the words Team Review in the Design Review panel

and add Taoh Green as an additional reviewer.

Taoh will now get a notification that he has been asked to review this design. Let's say both he and Kyle approve our design. Logging in as Thomas, I should see a green check mark next to the design in the design library:

and two new notifications:

Starting The Next Stage

There is now a green checkmark next to the review step in the design inspector and I can now click the button "Start Next Review Stage"

Let's go ahead and start the PI Review step and choose Mike to be our reviewer:

You'll see that a new tab appears in the Design Review panel.

Mike will have the same options to Reject, Request Changes, or Approve as we've seen before. If we click the blue circle next to the words PI Review, we can see the status of the review process:

This process can be repeated for as many steps as you'd like to configure.

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