User guide
Approvals
Ask a named agent to approve, answer a request addressed to you, and understand why a rejection is decisive, a decision is final, and an approval covers only the dates it was given for.
Who this is for: agents — both the person who needs a change approved and the person being asked. Before you start: the change must already have a record (guide 2).
An approval in Concessa is a request addressed to one named person, answered by that person and nobody else. There are no approval groups, no quorums and no thresholds.
Requesting an approval
In the Concessa panel, under Approvals, choose Request an approval.
- Approver — pick the person. The list is the people assignable to issues in this project, and two are missing from it: you, and whoever recorded the change, if that is somebody else. Neither can approve it.
- Approving as (optional) — free text, up to 80 characters. “Service owner”, “Security”, “Head of Platform”. It records who is speaking, not what they are permitted to do.
- Choose Request approval.
Three things happen at once:
- The request is recorded, and audited.
- Concessa posts a comment on the Jira issue naming who was asked. That comment is the notification — Concessa sends no email of its own, so your approver hears about it through Jira’s own notification settings. On a Jira Service Management project the comment is internal on a customer request, so the portal does not show it; an issue with no request type is not on the portal, and gets an ordinary comment.
- If the change was in draft, it moves to In review. You do not need to move it yourself.
Ask as many people as the change needs. Every one of them must approve before a normal change can be approved.
Why you cannot approve your own change
Self-approval is refused outright rather than flagged. It is the most common finding in a change-management audit, it is trivially avoidable, and an app that allowed it while producing audit evidence would be selling something it does not deliver.
Two people, and they are not always the two you expect. The approver may be neither the person asking nor the person who recorded the change. Those differ whenever one agent writes up a change and another sends it for approval, and it is the case the rule is most often asked to cover: without it, a colleague can route the request back to the author, and the author approves their own work with the record showing two names.
The rule is enforced three times — when the request is made, when it is answered, and again when the change moves to Approved, which is the moment that actually decides. An answer from the author does not count towards the change however it came to be there.
An emergency change made alone is still recorded — it simply carries no approval, which is the honest answer.
Answering a request
If a request is addressed to you, the panel shows you a comment box and two buttons on your row, and only on your row:
Write a comment if you want to — it is stored with your decision and appears in the export — then choose Approve or Reject.
These are not the buttons at the bottom of the panel. Approve and Reject on your own row answer your approval request. The ones under Change record status say Move to Approved and Move to Rejected, and they move the change record itself, once everybody’s answers are in — see The governance lifecycle.
Concessa posts a Jira comment recording what you decided and what you wrote. Your comment is quoted in it, so write it for everyone who can read the issue. It is up to 1,000 characters.
If Jira refuses a comment, your action still counts. The request, decision or reschedule is saved and audited either way. The panel then says Saved — but Jira did not accept the comment: Jira will not have notified anyone, so tell the people involved yourself.
A rejection rejects the change. One rejection is decisive: the change moves straight to Rejected, and no amount of approval from anyone else overrides it. Unless the change’s outcome has already been recorded — a rejection given after that point is still recorded and still visible beside the outcome, but it no longer moves the change’s status. What happened has happened; the record of whether it was ever properly authorised is a separate question from whether it was carried out.
A decision is final. You cannot change your answer. Re-deciding would rewrite history the audit trail has already sealed, and asking for a new approval does not reopen it either — the same account cannot be asked about the same change twice. Your answer is final. If the change’s dates later move outside the window you answered for, your request resets and you can answer again. If you have new concerns, comment on the issue. If the change should be decided afresh, its author raises a new change record.
An approval covers the dates it was given for. If somebody moves the change’s planned window outside the one you approved, your approval is withdrawn automatically, the change returns to In review, and you are asked again. This is not the same as changing your mind: you are being asked about a different change to the one you said yes to. The withdrawal is recorded in the audit trail, Concessa comments on the issue so nobody finds out by accident, and your original decision stays sealed in the chain. Shortening a window inside what was approved does not trigger it — only moving outside it does.
Once the approved window has ended with no outcome recorded, dates can only move forward. A genuine postponement — moving the planned start into the future — is allowed and withdraws the approval as above. Moving the dates to match what actually happened is refused: that would be rewriting the record of what was approved after the fact rather than recording what happened, which is what recording the outcome is for.
The approver cap
A change can carry at most 20 approvers. Approval requests cannot be withdrawn, so if a change already has 20, the way forward is to get an answer from the people already on it rather than to add a 21st. This is a limit on how many approvals one change can be revoked or reset together in a single action, not a judgement about how many people a change genuinely needs signed off by.
Reading the progress line
The line above the table is the whole state of the approvals in one sentence:
| It says | It means |
|---|---|
| No approvers requested | Nobody has been asked yet. |
| n of t approved | n people have approved out of t asked; none has rejected. |
| n of t rejected | At least one rejection. This takes precedence over the approved count. |
A change is ready to approve when every person asked has approved, and at least one person was asked. There is no partial credit.
What can go wrong
| Message | What it means |
|---|---|
| “You cannot ask yourself to approve a change you are recording. Ask another agent.” | The self-approval rule. Ask somebody else. |
| “Name has already been asked to approve this change.” | One request per person per change. If you need them to look again, that is a new change record. |
| “Choose who should approve this change.” | No approver selected. |
| “This approval was requested from Name. Only they can answer it.” | You are looking at somebody else’s request. |
| “You have already answered this request, and an answer cannot be changed.” | Decisions are final by design. See “Answering a request” above for what to do instead. |
| Your decision reset to pending without you doing anything | The change’s dates moved outside the window you approved. Look again and answer afresh. |
| “That approval request no longer exists.” | The record moved under you — reload the panel. |
| “Ask at least one agent to approve this change before approving it.” | You tried to approve a change nobody has been asked about. |
| “n approvers have not answered yet.” | Unanimity is required. Chase them, or ask fewer people. |
| “ |
The approver you picked wrote the change up. Pick somebody else. |
| “You recorded this change, so you cannot approve it.” | The request is addressed to you but the change is yours. Ask another agent to approve it; this request cannot be answered. |
| “An approver has rejected this change.” | One rejection blocks approval outright. |
| “This change already has 20 approvers, the most one change can carry. …” | The approver cap, above. Get an answer from the approvers already on it. |
What this guide does not cover
Moving the change between statuses (guide 4), and what happens when a change is scheduled into a freeze window (guide 5).