Approval - Prevent the Requester from being the Approver

You can build this into the conditions on a workflow depending on who the approver is relatively easily. It does mean that you’d have to create a separate fork of your workflow to reflect who to send to instead of the original approver, but it would handle this for you.

As an example, a requested for manager has to approve on a request.  The below condition would happen before the approval step and check if the requested for manager is the person who would receive the approval in this case and if not, continue as usual. If the return is False, then you’d have your separate fork on the flow to handle the request separately.

While the idea is nice, we do still want the requester to select who they want to assign as the approver as their direct manager may not be the correct person to send the approval to.

I feel it’s a flaw with that approach, even if you “block” themself. They can just set a colleague to do the approval? In most cases, it’s someone that has the authority to do it.

It’s usually the reporting manager, project manager, department manager, or service owner. The reporting manager can be set up easily if your IDP/AD/Entra has that information. Projects can be handled with custom objects, same with service owner. Harder to get department synced in Fresh. 

As ​@Medic1334 say you can have expression something like this {{custom_field_who_should_approve}} =! {{ticket.actual_requester}}. 

​@Daniel Söderlund our agencies very large and not like normal agencies. An approver could be multiple different people and is not something you can set as a specific person. There are specific roles that can but there are so many people that could be in that specific role and everyone acts in higher duties and moves around the departments quite a lot so this approach would not work for us.

While yes, they could select a colleague but it is up to the person who is processing the ticket to check what level they are and if they are higher than the person that has lodged the ticket. Unfortunately, it is not as simple as setting a reporting manager. We would love if it was. 

Some access needs quite high up to get approval from or only one specific person can approve that type of access. In those cases, we have removed the approval and just had it go to that person but that is a special case.

Okay, only way I see to catch this is with expression and “close” the ticket.