I recently received the following question:
"During our introduction of Integrify we experienced a very urgent issue: a lot of tasks get assigned to multiple people who are spread over different locations. To avoid multiple people doing the same work at the same time, everyone of them has to check if any body else has already “opened” the task and is working on the task. And even worse, by opening such a task and viewing the other’s people’s state you get marked as “in progress”. So from a controller’s view it is impossible to tell who is actually working on the task or just took a look at the other people’s state without speaking to everybody! "
We’ve actually run into many situations like this where a task is thrown out to a “queue” of rotating individuals and someone accepts to take a task on. The most efficient way to handle this is to slightly modify your process and have a task where all individuals are assigned but once a single individual completes that task it is cancelled out for all of the other recipients.
Take a look at the following Task Flow:
The first task is just a Milestone that is assigned to a group of individuals. The Worker Queue Milestone has a single option that states “I Accept This Work Assignment”. Once a person selects that option and completes the task, the next task called Form to Complete is assigned to the Dynamic Recipient Task Completer for the Worker Queue Milestone task.
As the process is executing it will look something like the following:
Another feature of structuring your process this way is that as an individual accepts the work assignment it will cancel the open task for the other individuals assigned, thus removing it from their dashboard automatically.
By structuring your process in this fashion, it will make it easier to identify who accepted a given work assignment and then the owner of the process can always monitor who is assigned to the Form to Complete task rather than trying to interpret the statuses of the other tasks where many people are assigned. It will also facilitate easier communication among your work force that maybe spread across several locations.