Job Ownership - Assigning and re-assigning Jobs

Job Ownership - Assigning and re-assigning Jobs

Overview

Every Job within HelpMaster must be assigned to either a person (a staff member), or a Skillgroup.  Initially, this assignment is performed as part of the Job creation process.  Following this, a Job may change ownership, or be re-assigned throughout the rest of its lifecycle.  Assigning, or re-assigning a Job is the process of allocating that Job to a certain staff member, or Skillgroup for further action.

When manually performed, all Job re-assignment is performed via the Action screen.  Automated reassignments may be performed by Workflow, Priority Manager, Email Manager, or Triggered Events.

Assignment concepts

Assigning to a Staff member

Assigning a Job to a specific staff member is the most direct way to allocate a Job.  If a Job is assigned to a specific staff member, the Job will appear in their Job queue and can be further actioned from there.  When a Job is assigned to a specific staff member, by default it is also assigned to one of the Skillgroups to which that staff member belongs.  If a Skillgroup is not selected during the assignment process, the default Skillgroup for that staff member will be used.

Note that it is only possible to assign a Job to a staff member if their Availability Status is set to Available.

A Job can be assigned by selecting a staff member first, and then one of the Skillgroups to which they belong

or, by selecting a Skillgroup first and then one of the staff members belonging to that Skillgroup

Assigning to a Skillgroup

Assigning a Job directly to a Skillgroup is a way of pooling Jobs in a common Job queue.  These Jobs can then be reassigned to the appropriate staff member within that Skillgroup.

If a Job is assigned to a Skillgroup, it will appear in 2 different places within the Explorer.  Firstly, it will appear in the Unassigned Jobs queue for the Skillgroup that is it assigned to within the Skillgroups panel of the Explorer.  It will also appear within the Unassigned - Skillgroup queue for each staff member that is associated with that Skillgroup.

If a Job is assigned to a Skillgroup, the only action that can be performed on it is another re-assign action.  This reassignment may be to another Skillgroup, or to a staff member.  Only once a Job is actually assigned to a person and not a Skillgroup, can it have the full range of actions performed on it.

Auto Assignment Algorithms

In addition to manually assigning Jobs directly to either a specific staff member, or to a Skillgroup, HelpMaster also features Auto Assign feature that is used whenever a Skillgroup is selected as the assignee.

Pre-configure assignment via templates

A common way to pre-configure Job assignment is to set it in Action Templates, and Job Templates. In many business scenarios, certain types of Jobs, or actions will always be assigned to a specific person, or team. In these cases, it makes sense to create a template for this and set the assignment there.

See Also

Reassigning a Job

Skillgroups

Action Templates

Job Templates

Auto-assign algorithms 

For automatic Job re-assignments, see the following:

The Priority Manager

The Email Manager

Triggered Events

Use Workflow within a job to reassign a job

Workflow