Once a proposer creates a draft proposal, that draft becomes visible to others who have proposer or view-only access to the system, and only the proposer can edit or delete (if necessary) the draft.
This single ownership of the proposal can cause issues during the approval path — which takes several months at minimum — in scenarios such as:
- If the proposer is away on vacation.
- If the proposer is on leave (planned or unplanned).
- If the proposer changes roles within the University.
- If the proposer leaves the University.
In these cases, any drafted proposal becomes orphaned/abandoned and cannot be submitted to the workflow by someone else in the department, though system administrators can submit it on their behalf via a support portal request. This leads other proposers to redo the work by recreating the draft — an inefficient use of time.
A better solution is for a proposer to share each of their drafts with at least one other proposer from the same department. This can be done using the Shared feature (where sharing status can be removed) or the Commenting feature (where sharing status remains for the entirety of the time the proposal is at that stage).
All proposers who have had a proposal shared with them will become co-owners of the draft and they can:
- Edit the draft.
- Submit the draft.
- Share the draft with another proposer.
Note: Only the proposer who submits the proposal to the workflow will be recorded as the proposer of record for workflow purposes and will
- Be able to receive the proposal if an approver needs to send it back.
- Receive the automated notification at the end of the approval process.
Recommendation: Proposers should to get into the habit of sharing their draft with one or more of their colleagues as soon as the draft is created and populated with the desired curriculum content.