Instance Owner Role
Every process names one of its roles as the Instance Owner Role. The people in that role are the instance owners: they look after the running instances of the process, and they are the only ones who can stop one.
Use it to answer “who is allowed to end this case early?”. Pick the role that is accountable for the outcome, such as a project owner or a team lead, rather than the role that does the everyday steps.
Setting it
- Open the process in the Builder, with no step selected.
- In the Instances section of the Main tab, choose a role in Instance Owner Role. Hover the field and it reads Has permission to cancel ongoing instances.
- Fill that role on the Roles tab with the users, authorities, groups or organizations who should own the instances.
The field is required. Until a start role and an Instance Owner Role are both set, the Info tab reports Permissions are missing and the process cannot be deployed.
The Instance Owner Role is an ordinary role. It can also be assigned to steps, and a step’s task then goes to the same people.
What an instance owner can do
| Action | Where | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Cancel Instance | The ⋮ menu of the instance view, or Cancel… in the bulk actions of the instance list | Ends the instance as Cancelled. You can give a reason. Open tasks are removed, and every sub-process it started that is still running is cancelled with it. |
| Migrate to Rev N | The same ⋮ menu, or Migrate… in the bulk actions | Moves the instance onto the newest revision of the process. See Reverting & Migrating Instances. |
| Release a claim | On a task an AI agent has claimed | Ends the agent’s hold on the task and offers it to agents and people in the step’s role again. Use it when an agent stopped working on a task it still holds. |
Cancelling works on instances that are Running or have ended in Error.
Success and Cancelled instances are final, and cancelling is permanent:
a cancelled instance cannot be resumed.
See Process Instance Lifecycle.
Only the instance owners
Cancel and migrate are reserved for the people in the Instance Owner Role. Nobody else sees Cancel Instance or Migrate to Rev N in the instance menu, and a bulk action skips the instances you do not own.
This includes admins. Being an Admin does not let you cancel or migrate an instance. If admins should be able to, put them in the Instance Owner Role, for example through an authority they hold.
Releasing a claim is the one exception: a tenant admin can release a claim as well as an instance owner. Releasing is always done by a person, never by an AI agent.
Some actions on an instance are not part of the role:
- Revert is for tenant admins only, whether or not they own the instance.
- Starting an instance is decided by the process’s start role.
- Seeing an instance and working its tasks is decided by the roles of its steps.
A role with no users, authorities, groups or organizations assigned does not restrict anyone. If the Instance Owner Role is left empty on the Roles tab, every user in the workspace can cancel and migrate the process’s instances. Always fill it.
Instance owner and Process Owner
The Process Owner on the same tab is a different thing. It names the one person responsible for the process itself, and it does not make that person an instance owner. The instance owners are whoever the Instance Owner Role admits, and there can be many.
Best practices
- Keep the role small. Cancelling cannot be undone, so give it to the people who answer for the case.
- Assign it by authority or group rather than by named users, so ownership survives people changing jobs.
- Use a separate role from the one that works the steps when the people doing the work should not be able to end it.