Assign process owners
Every published process model has a Process Owner. The Process Owner is the position accountable for the process — not an individual employee. The employee currently filling that position carries the accountability, which stays correct when people change roles.
Set the Process Owner
You can assign or change the Process Owner from two places:
- Process model properties panel — assign or change the owner at any time while editing the draft.
- Publish process model modal — set or confirm the owner on the first step of the publish wizard.
In both cases, search by position job title.
Set a subprocess owner
A subprocess can have its own owner, separate from the root Process Owner. Subprocess owners are not set from the publish wizard — open the subprocess in the BPMN editor and assign an owner from its properties panel.
Once assigned, the subprocess owner takes the place of the inherited Process Owner for that subprocess and everything beneath it (see below).
How inheritance works
Owners cascade through the process hierarchy one level at a time:
- The root process has a Process Owner.
- A subprocess without an explicit owner inherits from its immediate parent — either the root process or an enclosing subprocess.
- A task without an explicit owner inherits from its immediate parent — a subprocess or the root process. Tasks don’t propagate further because they have no descendants.
Setting an explicit owner on a subprocess overrides the inherited owner and becomes the new default for everything beneath it, until another explicit owner appears further down. In the publish wizard, you can also override inheritance for an individual embedded task instruction — choose a Task Owner instead of Inherit owner from parent.
See the owner in document lists
The Documents page has an Owner column that displays the assigned position’s job title. The column can be sorted.