When you use workflows in your organization to automate business processes, you have to deal with the fact that people are lazy. They don’t like work. One of the things you do a lot in workflows, is create tasks. Somewhere in a process, somebody needs to complete a task before the next step in the process can be completed. So, the task is created and your workflow waits until someone completes it. The importance of completing tasks in the context of workflows is often underestimated. Completing a task in the context of a workflow is a 2-step process and this is a concept which lots of people don’t seem to understand and this leads to a lot of problems.

• Step 1: Executing the action in the task
• Step 2: Mark the task completed

Let me give you an example on how this might lead to issues.

You have an onboarding workflow for new employees. This workflow initiates several other workflows.
One of those other workflows is the creation of an Exchange mailbox. This “Exchange Mailbox Creation” workflow creates a task for the Exchange admins which instructs them to create a mailbox for the new employee.

Meanwhile, the main workflow handles some other stuff which is important for onboarding the new employee. Somewhere at the end of the process, the main workflow is going to check if the mailbox has been created. As long as the mailbox is not created, the onboarding process cannot be completed.
To do this, the workflow contains a loop which checks if the Exchange Mailbox Creation workflow is completed. If it’s not, It’s going to pause for 1 hour and check again. This repeats itself until the Exchange Mailbox Creation workflow is completed.

The problem is… that workflow will NEVER end because the people who are responsible for creating Exchange mailboxes do understand the importance of creating a mailbox for a new employee, but don’t understand the importance of marking the task completed in the system. They don’t know that the overall onboarding process relies on the completion of those tasks.

Direct results :

• The Exchange Mailbox creation workflow will be waiting indefinetely unless someone sets that task to completed
• The onboarding process for this employee will never finish because of the Exchange Mailbox Creation workflow will never finish

Indirect results:

• The history list will grow constantly because of the loop which generated 2 list items every hour (for the pause action). Read this post to understand the importance of maintaining a history list.
• The workflowprogress data table will grow constantly because of the same loop. Read this post to understand the importance of workflowprogress data.

A workflow designer has the responsibility of covering this by :

• including reminder notifications in the tasks
• Have some kind of escalation procedure in the case nobody bothers to complete those tasks. Escalating to a manager often helps
• Make sure that the task notifications stress the importance of completing the tasks for a proper process termination. This should also be emphasized in the reminder notifications or escalations as well

For the example of the onboarding process, I had 91 running instances which have been running for months up until a year because of these incompleted tasks. These 91 instances are responsible for a history list that grows with almost 4400 list items every single day.

You can avoid all of this by thinking through your process and include logic in your workflow and tasks to avoid these situations. But if you are tasked with cleaning up an environment where these kind of issues exist for a while, you might have an environment which has thousands of running workflows that keep filling your history lists and workflowprogress tables with useless information and you need a way to stop this madness.

If you are using Nintex Workflow, you can use the below which allows you to terminate Nintex Workflows in batch. You specify your Nintex content database and a date and the script will terminate all running instances that didn’t have any activity since the specified date.

Keep in mind that terminating workflows might result in notification emails being sent by the system.