Available to Enterprise Plan Customers, Approval Workflow can be used to ensure that high risk or routine operations receive administrative approval before pilots head out into the field. This is a great feature for reinforcing compliance with SOPs, as well as generally underscoring the safety and awareness culture within your organization.
Setup and Configuration
To begin, we’ll need to do a little setup work to ensure that there are Approvers configured within the system. These Approvers are the administrators that will receive approval notifications and ultimately decide whether or not Operations can be flown. If you’re a pilot, you can skip this section and pick up below at Submitting Approvals.
From the Personnel setup page (Manage > Personnel), select the individual from the list that should be given an Approver profile
Once an individual has been selected, hit the Edit button on the top-right corner of their personnel profile.
Once in the Edit mode, select the + sign in the Roles area of their personnel profile, and add the Approver role.
Select Save at the top of the page once you’re done to save the personnel profile with the new Approver role. Repeat this process for any personnel within your organization that would ever be expected to approve operations on behalf of the company.
Note: If an Approver creates an operation where they are the PIC, the Request Approval option will not appear. Since they are an Approver themselves this option is not given.
Submitting Approvals
Now that approvers are configured in the system, the rest of the process is pretty straightforward. To begin, just create an Operation in Skyward as you would normally. For any assistance with Operations, please review the Building an Operation article.
Once your operation has been created, you’ll notice a status field that populates in the top-right corner of the operation, and shows it as Planned.
Select that Planned button to drop down the statuses, and when you’re ready to submit your operation to an approver, select Request Review.
Once Request Review has been selected, you’ll get a popup dialogue where you can select the reviewer(s) that should review your flight operation. You can also use the Comments field in order to add any necessary comments for the reviewer as context.
Once the reviewer(s) and the comments are complete, hit Send to send the operation off for review. The reviewers will each get an email with basic details of the operation, a link to the operation, and the comments that were entered.
From there, when the reviewer logs in to Skyward, they’ll see the operation exists in a Needs Review status.
The reviewer then has the ability to review all details related to the operation and make an informed decision on whether or not it should move forward. Once done, the Needs Review button can be selected, and Review Operation chosen to provide either an approval, a denial, or request specific changes to the operation.
This choice, and all associated comments, are sent back to the Pilot as part of an email notification during the review process.
In each case, you’ll see the Operation itself reflect the status chosen by the Approver, both from within the Operation itself, as well as in the Operations List View
Please note that for operations that are either denied, or are requested to change, the Pilot will be able to resubmit those operations for approval using the same request process as detailed above.