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Understanding Approval Workflows for Surveys
The Survey Response Approvals feature allows survey creators to dynamically assign approvers to review and validate data submitted through surveys before it's added to your organization's data. This ensures that crowdsourced information is validated by the appropriate people, maintaining data accuracy and trust.
This can help your teams:
Improves data governance: Ensures data accuracy and reliability by adding a survey review process.
Reduces bottlenecks: By distributing the responsibility of approving data changes to relevant stakeholders rather than relying on a centralized team, the approval process is sped up, reducing the workload on your team.
Leverages expertise: Allows subject matter experts to validate data changes, ensuring data integrity.
Provides accountability: Maintains a detailed audit log of changes and approvals for transparency and accountability.
When should you consider adding Approval Workflows?
You should use the Survey Response Approvals if your organization:
Has a high volume of data contributors.
Frequently updates and modifies data.
Operates in a strict regulatory environment where compliance is a major concern.
Prioritizes data quality, accuracy, and consistency and needs robust governance controls.
Your team is becoming a bottleneck for data verification.
You want to ensure that crowdsourced data is validated before it impacts decisions.
An approval workflow can help you ensure that the appropriate people review and approve data changes before they enter your repository. When survey respondents submit a survey, their responses are held in a pending state until an assigned approver reviews them. The approver can then choose to approve or reject the responses. Once the responses are approved, the data is updated and an audit trail is created
Note: Approval workflows can add a layer of complexity to your data collection process, so make sure you consider if your teams are set up in a way that allows you to leverage them for data verification before you add response approvals to your critical surveys.
How to use it: Add Response Approval to a Survey
Enable Response Approval: When setting up a survey, admins can enable the "Response Approval" option.
Prerequisite: Admin or Writers with 'Create survey' edit privileges
1. From Ardoq's home screen, navigate to the Survey Overview page
2. From the asset list, select an existing survey or press the 'Create new +' button
3. Once inside the 'Survey Builder, ' proceed through the steps to define your survey.
Note: When setting up your questions, approvals will work for field questions, reference questions, and conditional questions, but it does not support tag questions.
4. Continue through the steps until you reach the “Response Approvals” step
5. Toggle the 'Enable Response Approvals' switch to turn on the approval workflow.
6. Choose the Approval Configuration
Here, you have three options for setting the main approver. Choose the one that best fits your workflow:
By Users and User Group: Select a specific user group. Any user within the selected group can approve or reject survey responses.
By Relationship: Approvers can be assigned based on their relationship to the component type specified in the survey (e.g., "owns" or "expert in").
By Advanced Relationship: Use traversal to define an approver who might be multiple reference steps away from the context component and needs to meet specific filter conditions, such as having a specific title.
Note: When using By Relationship or By Advanced Relationship as your approval method, Ardoq will automatically identify users related to the given survey component type.
This is done by evaluating the Email or User fields of your target components. If one of these fields is selected and the value matches a user in your organization, that user will be dynamically assigned as an approver.
7. Scroll down and select a Backup Approver
By default, the survey creator is set as the backup approver. You can add additional backup approvers as needed.
What is a Backup Approver?
Backup approvers act as a final fallback when no primary approver can be determined. If Ardoq is unable to evaluate and assign an approver—such as when a component is newly created and doesn’t yet have users related to it—a backup approver ensures that the approval process can still move forward.
This prevents approval tasks from getting stuck or left in limbo due to missing or incomplete data.
7. Finish Configuring the Survey
Once the approval workflow is set, continue configuring the rest of the survey as needed.
8. Finally, save and publish your survey
When you’re finished, click Save and then Publish. Your survey will now include response approvals. Contributors’ responses will go through the configured approval workflow before being added to your repository.
Submitting a Change Request
When a survey includes response approval, the survey responses submitted as change requests must be approved before being finalized and added to your repository.
Applies to: Any survey respondent filling out a survey with response approvals enabled.
1. Open the survey you’ve been asked to respond to.
2. Select a Component
You can either:
Add a new component (e.g., a new application), or
Select an existing component from the list of available entries.
3. Click on a component and complete the survey fields as usual.
4. Once finished, click 'Submit' to send your responses for approval.
After submission, the component you responded to will display a Pending Approval tag. This indicates your change request is waiting for review by an approver.
Note: You won’t receive a notification, but you’ll be able to see the approval status directly in the survey view. The Pending Approval tag will remain until your request is either approved or rejected.
Submission nuance: What if the survey respondent is also the approver?
Suppose a survey respondent is also in the approval audience (including the backup approvers). In that case, the approval process is short-circuited—their changes are added directly to your repository without creating a change request.
Approving and Rejecting Change Requests
Prerequisite: Active Ardoq user with Ardoq Discover access. Roles: Contributor, Reader, Writer, and Admin.
When a respondent submits a survey with response approvals enabled, their input is sent as a change request. The assigned approvers are then responsible for reviewing and either approving or rejecting these submissions.
As an approver you'll receive an in-app notification when a change request is assigned to you
1. Look for a red dot on the notification bell icon in the top navigation.
2. Click the notification to go to My Tasks.
Alternatively, you can access My Tasks by navigating to Discover and selecting the approval task from the next to the Quick Links section on of the Discover homepage.
On My Tasks, you’ll see a list of pending approval tasks.
3. If not already highlighted, click the approval task for the component change request.
You’ll now see an overview based on the survey the component was submitted through:
Each changed field is listed with its original and 'new' proposed value
You can approve or reject each field individually
Or you can click Approve All or Reject All to speed up the process
Tip: Enable 'Show full survey' to view all survey questions, including fields that were not changed, for added context.
5. Review the change request, then approve and/or reject changes by clicking the Approve (✓) or Reject (x) icons next to the question.
6. To finalize your review and submit your decision(s), end by clicking 'Submit'.
The task will then move to the Completed section of your to-do list in My Tasks. You can then navigate to the Component Overview Page and see the changes reflected in the Details section.
Tracing Changes in the Audit Log
All approval-related actions are fully traceable through the Audit Log, providing transparency and accountability across the entire approval process.
When a survey with response approvals enabled results in a committed change, the following details are logged:
What was component or reference changed
When the change was commited
Who approved the change
Who originally submitted the response
The approver is recorded as the person who made the change in the Audit Log, but it also shows which survey the data came from, along with the identity of the original submitter. This gives you full traceability from submission to approval, making it easy to audit decisions or revert changes if needed.
To access this information:
1. In the navigation sidebar, go to Prefference > Audit Log in Ardoq.
2. Locate the relevant change to a component or reference.
3. Expand the entry to see the detailed context, including the change history, the approver, and the original submitter.