topic Re: Assign Task to a Group of Workers in ArcGIS Workforce Questions

Assign Task to a Group of Workers

MichaelGilbrook2 — Fri, 14 Jul 2017 17:44:29 GMT

I haven't started using Workforce yet, but I can't find the answer to my question in the available documentation. The typical use case for Workforce appears to involve sending an assignment to a particular worker. We'd like to make assignments (tasks) available to a group of workers, and allow the first available worker to accept the task. Is this an option within the Workforce app? Or would this require customization via the API? Thanks!

Michael

Re: Assign Task to a Group of Workers

CraigGillgrass — Mon, 17 Jul 2017 13:58:54 GMT

Hi Michael,

Thanks for you question on Workforce. You're correct, the typical use case for Workforce involves sending an assignment to a particular worker. Workforce does not currently support associating assignments with more than 1 worker, but it is something that is in our Backlog, I've added your request to the issue.

There are some ways to approach this in Workforce today for certain use cases; they may apply to yours, are you able to go into any more detail on your use case?

thanks,

Craig

Re: Assign Task to a Group of Workers

MichaelGilbrook2 — Mon, 17 Jul 2017 21:40:23 GMT

Hi, Craig, thanks for the prompt response. This particular use case has been described to me as resembling an IT Help Desk ticket system. We'd like to create a pool of workers at a water utility who can respond to field work requests, and allow up to 2 (but no more than 2) to "accept" a work order. I think the idea is that the field workers know their own availability better than someone who might be trying to dispatch them from a central office, so we'd rather have workers select the work orders they want to take on rather than having the work orders assigned. We don't have a current digital workflow for these workers, so we likely could adapt to any workflow that would allow this kind of work order issuance-acceptance behavior. Let me know if you need specific details to determine if your possible workaround is applicablle and I can pass those on to our project team to get more details.

Michael

Re: Assign Task to a Group of Workers

CraigGillgrass — Tue, 18 Jul 2017 11:52:12 GMT

Michael,

Thanks for the additional information; this helps, I've added it to our issue.

I think the workflow would be satisfied by what we're discussing for a future release; however, we'd still only permit 1 worker to be associated with a work assignment. Are the workers performing the same type of work? Are they performing related, but dependent work (i.e., Worker A must complete their work prior to Worker B)?

Craig

Re: Assign Task to a Group of Workers

KristinaFurukawa — Tue, 25 Jul 2017 01:29:42 GMT

Hi Craig,

Is there an ETA for this future release? I'm in a very similar situation to Michael, I work for a water/wastewater utility that is interested in using workforce/survey123 as a possible CMMS. Being able to assign work to a group and let field workers select assignments would be ideal and is one of the main missing capabilities that's holding us back right now. Some work assignments could potentially require more than 1 person so it would be helpful if there was a field that allowed the dispatcher to specify the preferred number of people for each assignment.

Thanks,

Kristina

Re: Assign Task to a Group of Workers

CraigGillgrass — Tue, 25 Jul 2017 15:18:05 GMT

Hello Kristina,

We have a tentative ETA for this ability which is later this year.

However, as I mentioned in my reply to Michael, we'd still only permit 1 worker to be associated with a work assignment.

Craig

Re: Assign Task to a Group of Workers

JonathanGroves — Fri, 18 Aug 2017 09:47:54 GMT

Craig - how about providing a function to easily duplicate an assignment so that a *copy* of the original could be assigned to the second person if it becomes clear that one worker will not be able to complete an assignment alone? I believe this would be a very powerful feature...

Hope this helps.

Jonathan

Re: Assign Task to a Group of Workers

CraigGillgrass — Wed, 23 Aug 2017 19:10:24 GMT

Hi Jonathan,

Would this be an exact copy of the assignment? Meaning, all fields that a dispatcher can enter values for would have the exact same values, including Attachments?

The date/time fields would all be different, but anything that the Dispatcher would enter could be copied.

Craig

Re: Assign Task to a Group of Workers

VirajP — Tue, 22 Jun 2021 08:48:25 GMT

I was hoping this ability already existed. I have multiple crews running soil sampling tests along a linear development, conducting tens of thousands of tests using Survey123 forms. I've prescribed the location that tests should occur at along the development but since the crews are leap frogging each other along the line it is nearly impossible to predetermine which of the 4-8 crew members should be assigned any particular tests.

I posted this comment to the Ideas section as well, but I noticed that was started over a year ago:

https://community.esri.com/ideas/12463

Cheers,

Adam

Re: Assign Task to a Group of Workers

JonathanGroves — Thu, 24 Aug 2017 07:19:13 GMT

Hi Craig.

Yes - I believe an exact copy (apart from date and time) would be of great value to many use cases.

Thanks and kind regards,

Re: Assign Task to a Group of Workers

CraigGillgrass — Thu, 24 Aug 2017 15:51:30 GMT

Adam,

Thanks for your feedback on Workforce.

We are working on some functionality that may help in your situation; it will allow workers to self-assign or pick-up unassigned work assignments. The main use case we're satisfying is when a field worker has completed their work for the day and has some additional time to perform other work. Those workers who have been given permission to view unassigned work assignments in the mobile app, will have the option to self-assign work.

While not exactly what you are asking for, from your description, I think this workflow could fit your scenario, as it's similar to other scenarios we've heard. You have a list of assignments to be done but it's the workers that decide which ones they perform. We're targeting this functionality to be available later this year.

Craig

Re: Assign Task to a Group of Workers

VirajP — Thu, 24 Aug 2017 16:26:40 GMT

That does sound like it would work for my project, thanks for the follow-up Craig. When the functionality is available it would be helpful if you added another category of Status so that we could differentiate Unassigned assignments from Free-for-All assignments. Although you'll probably need a better term than Free-for-All for the status, that doesn't sound very professional.

Cheers,

Adam

Re: Assign Task to a Group of Workers

CraigGillgrass — Thu, 24 Aug 2017 17:30:02 GMT

Adam,

Glad to hear this functionality will be useful.

We don't have any plans to provide the ability for an assignment to be flagged for self-assign/pick-up (whether that be a new status or some other mechanism).

Can you provide some info on the use case for this?

thanks,

Craig

Re: Assign Task to a Group of Workers

VirajP — Thu, 24 Aug 2017 18:09:10 GMT

For example, on my current project, I have prescribed 8300 assignments locations, all of which are unassigned currently. Of those 8300, approximately 1000 are ready for assignment, and the remaining 7300 will gradually become available for assignment over the next 3 months. As they become available I would like to change their status to self-assign.

If you simply add the ability for workers to self-assign unassigned tasks they might be lured to assignments that are not ready for collection. I guess one solution would be for me to delete all the non-ready, unassigned tasks and only add them in when they become ready, but this solution would mess up the Operation Dashboard I have running that tracks total assignments and their status.

I could also envision a situation where some ready but unassigned tasks should not be self-assignable, while others ready unassigned tasks could be picked by any crews.

-Adam

Re: Assign Task to a Group of Workers

CraigGillgrass — Mon, 28 Aug 2017 16:56:59 GMT

Adam,

"Of those 8300, approximately 1000 are ready for assignment," - What is it about the 1000 assignments that makes them ready for assignment? How do workers know what assignments to pick-up? Adding a property to new status to an assignment to indicate that it can be picked up is a big change to our workflow; I'm not against doing it, but would really like to dig into how/why this would be needed.

I agree that, removing the 7300 will skew the dashboard results.

"I could also envision a situation where some ready but unassigned tasks should not be self-assignable, while others ready unassigned tasks could be picked by any crews." - Do you have some examples for this?

thanks, Craig

Re: Assign Task to a Group of Workers

JonathanGroves — Tue, 29 Aug 2017 12:42:18 GMT

A thought just occurred to me... If the teams were able to both log in to the same account (as a single Worker), then the Assignments would be available for either of them to complete, right? A tweak to your backend would be needed, Craig - because the location tracking showing Worker locations in the Dispatcher portal seems to only show the last-logged-in mobile device if you log more than one in. Perhaps it could show the location of all the Workers added in to that account. I guess there could be financial reasons why this might not be desirable, though

Hope this helps.

Re: Assign Task to a Group of Workers

JustinConnerWR — Tue, 26 Sep 2017 14:13:31 GMT

I have prepared a presentation to our municipal users group to go over the many limitations of Workforce for our organization and would be happy to share it if you're still doing discovery on Workforce. For example, if work has to be done and someone is out sick, the replacement worker should have access to that individuals' tasks. Single sign-on doesn't allow that. If a task has several parts, Workforce doesn't keep track of the progress of that task and managers have too much responsibility (and no mobile app) to make Workforce worthwhile. I have not yet found any use for which Workforce works OOTB; its only benefit is that I can add dropdowns on the fly with a hosted service. We are building tons of Collector apps for staff to use instead and leaving all tasks unassigned, but I still can't easily track multi-part tasks. Cartegraph, Munis, and other systems are probably more appropriate to most task management and hopefully could be integrated with Collector.

Re: Assign Task to a Group of Workers

CraigGillgrass — Wed, 27 Sep 2017 19:28:47 GMT

Hi Alison,

Thanks for your post on Workforce, you've raised some very good points around workflows we do not currently support. Let me add some information to each one to give an idea of where we're headed:

For example, if work has to be done and someone is out sick, the replacement worker should have access to that individuals' tasks. Single sign-on doesn't allow that.

A Dispatcher is able to re-assign any work assignment from one worker to another to facilitate re-assigning work while Workers are out of the office or unavailable. Assignments that are In Progress cannot be re-assigned; but that is something we're looking at.

If a task has several parts, Workforce doesn't keep track of the progress of that task and managers have too much responsibility (and no mobile app) to make Workforce worthwhile.

Correct, providing a way to track tasks within an assignment was not part of the original spec for Workforce. We know this is something users have asked for; but it's also something several business partners do quite well. If this is a requirement for a particular workflow, Workforce may not be the app to use.

I have not yet found any use for which Workforce works OOTB; its only benefit is that I can add dropdowns on the fly with a hosted service.

We know that Workforce isn't the solution for all scenarios, but we do have a large community who is finding value in it. I'd like to discuss your experience with Workforce in more detail and I've sent your a direct message with regards to that.

thanks,

Craig

Re: Assign Task to a Group of Workers

NathanBruce1 — Fri, 02 Feb 2018 20:23:05 GMT

Any update on this functionality?

Re: Assign Task to a Group of Workers

CraigGillgrass — Fri, 02 Feb 2018 20:44:39 GMT

Hi Nathan,

There's been a few pieces of functionality discussed\requested in this thread, but I'm assuming you mean the request to Assign an assignment\task to a group of workers. This isn't slated for any of our upcoming releases, however the request is in our backlog.

We do publish a sneak peek of the requests we're currently working on in our doc site at:

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