Workday Task Stuck in Awaiting Action: Reassign, Delegate or Advance It

To complete an item that shows Awaiting Action, the person it is assigned to opens it from My Tasks and acts on it. If that person cannot or will not, a business process administrator uses the Reassign Tasks task to move the step to someone else, or Manually Advance to push the event past the step. Which of these you can do depends on the business process security policy, not on how senior you are.

This page covers the follow-up actions once you know a step is stuck. To find out who Workday is waiting for and why, start with the Awaiting Action diagnosis guide, which walks through the Full Process Record and the reports that list stuck events.

Can I complete someone else's Awaiting Action task?

Not by default. A step belongs to its assignee, and Workday evaluates security for whoever is signed in. Three legitimate routes exist.

• Delegation. The assignee, or a business process administrator on their behalf, delegates their My Tasks items to another user. The delegate uses Switch Account to act on behalf of the delegator, and Workday evaluates security for the original owner, so the delegate can do no more than the delegator could.
• Reassignment. Ownership of the step moves to a different person.
• Manual advance. The step is skipped past, which is not the same as someone completing it.

Delegated items also show in the delegate's own My Tasks, titled with "On Behalf of" and the delegator's name, but the delegate cannot open the details until they switch accounts. If you start a proxy session as a user who has tasks delegated to them, Switch Account is not available.

Delegate, request reassignment, or reassign: what is the difference?

Delegation suits planned absence. Workday's delegation can run for a date range and can name an alternate delegate. Reassignment suits a step that has to move for good, such as when the owner has left the company or lost the access the step needs.

How a worker asks for a task to be reassigned

In My Tasks, select the Task Actions icon on the item, then Reassign, and choose a person or role in the Proposed Person column. The list of roles comes from the business process security policy for that step type. The request goes to the security groups in the Reassign Tasks permission on the policy and to groups with Modify on the Business Process Administration domain. If an administrator approves it, responsibility moves permanently to the new person.

If the Security Groups prompt on Request Reassignment is cleared on a policy, nobody can request reassignment for that process. That is a plausible reason a worker reports "there's no Reassign option."

How an administrator approves or denies the request

The request arrives in the administrator's My Tasks as a Business Process Reassignment Request. Choosing Approve requires a person in Reassign To (pre-filled, and you can change it). Choosing Deny requires a comment. After a denial the step stays in the original owner's My Tasks, and the Full Process Record shows the step status as Denied. The View Reassignment Requests button filters pending requests by business process and date range for bulk handling. Rows where you leave Action empty stay open.

How an administrator reassigns directly

Run Reassign Tasks, choose Reassign Tasks for Person (or Reassign Non-Delegated Tasks for steps where both the delegate and alternate delegate were excluded by routing restrictions), and optionally limit by the date the step was initiated. Workday documents what it will and will not accept as the new owner. It accepts a person with a non-worker role such as a student or an extended enterprise learner, and a terminated worker who still has an active account. It rejects someone with no active Workday account, such as a candidate.

Two gotchas from the documentation:

• A step excluded from My Tasks will not appear in the new assignee's My Tasks. They find it through the Business Process Transactions Awaiting Me report.
• You cannot use Reassign Tasks on an excluded step at all. Use the Reassign This Task related action from the event (under Business Process), the Reassign Business Process Step mass operation, or the Reassign Business Process Step web service.

Before reassigning, confirm the new person is in a security group listed under Who Can Do Actions on Entire Business Process on the policy. Otherwise you have moved the problem to someone who cannot act on it.

How do I manually advance a business process past a step?

Use Manually Advance when the step is waiting on someone who is unavailable and the process should carry on. From the event's related actions menu choose Business Process, then Advance Manually. Your security group needs the Manual Advance action under Who Can Do Actions on Entire Business Process on the policy. Not every process allows it: run the Business Process Configuration Options report to see whether a given business process can be advanced, sent back or canceled.

Details that catch people out:

• A step marked Do Not Advance in the definition cannot be advanced. The check box is on the business process definition.
• An unassigned step can only be advanced if Enable Advancing Unassigned Tasks is selected on Edit Tenant Setup - Business Processes.
• You can advance one step, or send the event to completion. The step's assignee gets a notification unless the definition disables notifications for manual advance.
• The Process History tab of the Full Process Record shows the skipped step as Manually Advanced.

Advancing skips the step's work. If the step carries data entry or an approval someone is accountable for, reassigning is the safer fix.

Send Back, Correct, Cancel and Rescind: which one is it?

These are different actions on different states, covered with a comparison table in the diagnosis guide. In short, per Workday's description: Send Back returns an event to an earlier step (Manual Send Back lets an administrator do it even when the step is not theirs), cancel ends an in-progress event, rescind reverses a completed one, and correct changes details of an existing event. Correct is available only when the policy names the security groups that may correct. Cancel and rescind cannot be undone, and Workday records an audit trail for cancel, rescind, correct and deny.

One subprocess detail matters when a parent looks stuck. Canceling a subprocess by itself skips it without canceling the parent, and if that subprocess was the completion step the parent completes.

How do I move many Awaiting Action steps at once?

Use Mass Operation Management, not a loop of single reassignments. Security is the Mass Operation Management domain, and users need membership in a segment-based security group with View and Modify access. You build a custom report that returns the steps, filter it on the field the operation needs, and point the task at it.

Things the documentation calls out:

• A report returning more than the operation's limit makes the whole run fail without processing anything. Most types are capped at 50,000 instances, with exceptions such as Cancel Business Process at 200,000.
• The reassign operation attempts every step the report returns, including unassigned ones and statuses such as Saved for Later and Sent Back. Filter with the Awaiting Persons field to separate assigned from unassigned.
• You cannot automate Send Back through MOM. Workday points to the Send Back Business Process EIB for volume send-backs, and recommends testing one sample event first.
• The standalone Mass Advance Business Process task runs in the background above 10 events. For high-volume work with detailed filtering, Workday recommends MOM instead.
• Workday suggests the standalone Mass Cancel Business Processes task only for fewer than 25 events.
• Redirect Inbox Items is a separate MOM type for integration failures. It schedules one of three redirect actions: Move to Next Step, Terminate Business Process, or Rerun Integration.

What can an ordinary worker do about their own Awaiting Action items?

Complete them in My Tasks, request reassignment, delegate them if the tenant allows it, or bulk approve. Bulk approval needs Modify on the Inbox: Business Process Bulk Approval domain, and the business process must allow it. The Business Process Configuration Options report shows whether Approval and Action steps qualify. A critical validation condition blocks bulk approval, a warning does not, and the task handles 100 items at a time.

Also fix the cause when it keeps happening. A Workday administrator can open Manage Business Processes for Worker to reassign a worker's My Tasks items or cancel processes about that worker, and Workday lets you configure it as an Action step in processes such as Termination and End Contingent Worker Contract so that a leaver's open tasks are handled before they go. If the delegation is not stopped when someone leaves, steps keep routing to their My Tasks.

Testing the fix before production

Reassign and advance both change real events. Try them in a sandbox with a sample event from the same business process definition, and use a proxy session as the assignee and as the administrator to check who can see which action. The multi-persona proxy testing guide lays out that sequence. If the step never ran in the first place, the cause is the routing, which the condition rule guide covers.

kiweely can read an event's Full Process Record in your tenant through its connection to Workday and tell you who a step is waiting on. It makes the change you approve, one at a time, and reads it back.