The audience, criteria, and content associated with your workflow will ultimately determine how and when the workflow will trigger. However, when a workflow doesn't trigger as expected there a few troubleshooting steps to take:
1. Check that the workflow was activated.
Before a workflow is live it needs to be activated. This is to prevent workflows from triggering while the details are still being worked on.
To check, navigate to Admin > Workflows and check the status column. If it's green, the workflow is active. Red means it is deactivated. To activate/deactivate select the pencil icon next to the workflow and select the corresponding action.
2. Timing.
Most of the triggers occur immediately or based on the audience, criteria, and content with a few exceptions:
A user was hired today and A user was hired XX days ago trigger at specific times of day. If the user hired-date values aren't in Continu at these times, then the workflows won't trigger.
- A user was hired today: Triggers at 7am PST / 10am EST. To ensure there are no missed workflows, check that users have their hired date set for the day of before the cut off time above.
- Tip: If the workflow doesn't trigger, use A user was hired exactly 1 day ago to capture missed learners on the following day.
- A user was hired exactly 60, 90, or XX days ago: Will trigger at 3:30pm PST / 6:30pm EST on the corresponding day listed. To ensure the workflow completes as expected, double-check that users' hired date is entered in Continu correctly.
A user has completed an assignment: If using a delay of 0 days, the next assignment will go out the morning after the previous assignment was completed rather than immediately.
3. Check that users were updated properly before the workflow runs. If you are updating your users through the SFTP server, ensure there were no errors on the date the user was initially uploaded or updated. If errors occurred, it is possible the user was not added or updated as expected. This is particularly important for any workflows with a user hired date Audience Trigger. Even if the user is showing the correct hired date now, if there was an error on the date the user was added then they likely missed the cutoff and were added after their Hire date.
See the SFTP troubleshooting guide for more information on why your update file may have failed.
4.: Check the Audience and Criteria are set up properly.
Ensure the audience and criteria are actually set up to capture users. Occasionally, the audience and criteria are set up too specific to capture any users. Make sure your Criteria aren't too restrictive to return any results.
To check the users a workflow was assigned, navigate to Admin > Users and check the Sent To column.
To confirm you have the correct intended triggers, refer to the Workflow Audience Trigger Guide, which will provide more in-depth information on Triggers.
5. If the workflow contains a learning track, double-check that the learning track is published.
6. If you have updated the workflow at any point, ensure the workflow in question has not previously triggered for this user. By selecting the "Sent To" column, you will be given a list of users who have triggered this workflow. You can search for specific users on this list using the search bar. If the user's name is on the list, the workflow has been triggered for this user in the past.