Auto-Assign Requests
In 4me, teams can either work with a coordinator or without one. When a coordinator is specified, that person will receive all the team’s assignments that are not assigned to a specific member in his/her inbox. When a team works without a coordinator, all the team’s assignments that are not assigned to a member will be listed in the My Inbox of each member of the team. A third option has now been added: ‘Auto-assign’. When this option is checked for a team, requests are automatically assigned to the members of the team, based on a comprehensive algorithm.
When a team has auto-assignment enabled, requests that are assigned to the team but have no member specified in the Member field are auto-assigned to a member from the team. When the Member field is cleared and the Team field is left unchanged, the auto-assign function will attempt to assign the request to another member of the team. Team notifications are suppressed, except when it is a Top impact request.
To effectively assign requests to a member of the team, the following factors are included in the auto-assign algorithm:
- Out-of-office settings
- Away settings
- Work hours (or team hours if no work hours are specified for the member)
- Holidays
- The ‘Next target’ values and total number of inbox items with status ‘Assigned’, ‘Accepted’, or ‘In Progress’ of the team members
- The targets of the request
The ‘Auto-assign’ option can be used both with and without a team coordinator. This is useful because sometimes auto-assignment will determine there is no best available person and leave the member field empty. At that point the coordinator is responsible for assigning the requests. This can happen, for example, when all members are out-of-office or away.