assignment

Assignments are a record of a temporary condition of an open work item within an executing flow. The condition requires a user or an external system to act on a work item for it to progress.

The phrase " perform an assignment" refers to a user's analysis, research, data input, and decisions that cause the assignment to be completed. (In certain situations, assignments can be processed completely or in part by a PRPC agent rather than by a person.)

Assignments are created by a flow operating on a work item, but assignments are not themselves part of the work item. The system saves data recording an assignment in instances of the Assign-Workbasket class, Assign-Worklist class, or other subclasses of the Assign- base class.

In a flow diagram, the shape in Process Modeler identifies an assignment, which references an activity with an Activity Type of Assign. At runtime, assignments appear on a user's worklist, or on a workbasket's list, in decreasing order of urgency. The research, analysis, decision making, and data entry that a user does to complete the assignment is known as processing the assignment. After the assignment is complete, it disappears from the worklist.

When a flow execution reaches an assignment shape at runtime, the system performs the following processing:

1. Computes the goal time and deadline time based on the current time and the service-level agreement (if any).
2. Identifies any skills required or requested for routing.
3. Calls the Router activity (if any) or decision tree to determine the workbasket or worklist that is to receive the assignment.
4. Saves the Assign-Workbasket, Assign-Worklist (or other Assign- class) instance.
5. Calls the Notify activity (if any) to send out an email notification.

Optionally, assignments may have an assignment status, with values such as Current or Next. This status is not related to the work item status, a different property in a different class.

Notes

• An assignment is an instance of a class derived from the Assign- base class, typically the Assign-Worklist or Assign-Workbasket class.
• From the worklist display, users can click the Where-am-I? button to discover the current assignment shape on the diagram representation of the flow.
• By default, assignment shapes are designated as entry points, which allows users to return to them when processing later assignments, by using the breadcrumbs control or the Work-.Previous flow action.
• By convention, many standard activities assume that an assignment instance when on the clipboard has a page name of newAssignPage.
• One work item may have multiple flow executions in process and each may have one or more open assignments. An activity can iterate through property .pxFlow("flowname").pxAssignmentKey to find the handle of each open assignment.
• Agents can complete assignments and cause a flow execution to progress. The standard activity Work-.ResumeFlow allows an agent — typically the Pega-ProCom agent — to select and complete a flow action ordinarily routed to a person. When called by a service-level agreement, this activity can implement a business practice such as "If the manager does not reject a request within 30 days, the request is automatically approved."

• Informally, the work that a user does to "perform" or complete an assignment is sometimes called a task. Standard version 5 reports in the Monitor Activity workspace summarize or analyze "task time" — how long the assignment was open. For example, the chart defined by the summary view rule Assign-Worklist.AgeByWorklistTask is called Timeliness by Task.

• Standard properties recording user behavior and performance of assignments have "task" in the property name; for example pyPerformTaskTime.

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