Get Next Work feature

Using the Get Next Work feature, you can configure your application to select the next assignment for a user. By choosing the best, most appropriate assignment to work on next, your application can promote user productivity, timeliness of processing, and customer satisfaction.

The following diagram illustrates the main activities that are run when the doUIAction activity is invoked from a browser where the action parameter is set to getnextwork. The entry point to the GetNextWork algorithm is the Work-.GetNextWork activity. Based on the operator's [user's] record configuration, either their worklist is searched first, or the work queues listed on the operator record are searched first. If an assignment is found, it is further examined by the GetNextWorkCriteria Decision Tree. Ultimately, either an acceptable assignment is found, or it is not.

Users typically click Next Assignment in the User portal to retrieve assignments. An activity then starts and performs several steps to retrieve the assignments. The application calls the @baseclass.doUIAction activity, and that calls Work-.GetNextWork, which immediately calls Work-.getNextWorkObject.

What happens next depends on the configuration of the operator record of the user. If the user does not select Get from work queues first then the Work-.findAssignmentInWorklist activity is invoked, followed by the Work-.findAssignmentInWorkbasket activity if no assignment is found. If user selects the Get from work queues first, then Work-.findAssignmentInWorkbasket is invoked, followed by the Work-.findAssignmentInWorklist activity if no work queue assignment is found.

The Work-.findAssignmentInWorklist and Work-.findAssignmentInWorkbasket activities retrieve assignments with the Assign-Worklist.GetNextWork and Assign-WorkBasket.GetNextWork list views, respectively. The following figure shows the area within an Operator record in which work queues are listed in a certain order. The Urgency Threshold value is used during the first pass through the list. The urgency must be above the listed threshold to be considered. If a second pass is required, the threshold value is ignored.

When multiple work queues are listed on a user's operator record, the work queues are processed from top to bottom. If you configure an Urgency Threshold for the work queue, then assignments with an urgency above the defined threshold are prioritized. Lower urgency assignments are considered only after all applicable work queues are emptied of assignments with an urgency above the threshold. If Merge work queues is selected, the listed work queues are treated as a single work queue.

Instead of specifying the work queues to retrieve work from, you can select the Use all work queues assignments in user's team option to include all work queues belonging to the same work group as the user. When using this option, take care to exclude work queue assignments that are used to wait for subcases to complete.

The following figure shows the area within an assignment’s rule form with the assignment routing settings. Here, the Custom option is selected, which permits the user to specify whether to route to a worklist or work queue, followed by naming a routing activity. The specified routing activity is ToSkilledWorkbasket.

If you configure the case to route by using the ToSkilledWorkbasket router, then the skills defined on the operator record of the user are considered when retrieving the next assignment. An assignment can have both required and desired skills. Only required skills are considered by the Get Next Work functionality.

You define the user's skills by completing the Skill and Rating fields on the operator record. Skills are stored in the pySkills property on the OperatorID page. Skills checking is not performed when users fetch work from their own worklist, because they would not own an assignment without the proper skills. The Get Next Work functionality ensures that users can only retrieve assignments from the workbasket if the user has all the skills with at least the ratings defined.

The Assign-Worklist.GetNextWork list view uses the default getContent activity to retrieve assignments. The Assign-WorkBasket.GetNextWork uses a custom get content activity called getContentForGetNextWork to construct a query which conditionally joins with Index-AssignmentSkills and Index-OperatorSkills. The query varies based on Application settings rules that start with GetNextWork_. This query compares the user's skills to the assignment's required skills, if any. Conditional joins are not possible in Listview. So to achieve the same, you can maintain multiple list views with and without a join condition and call conditionally if you don't need to customize a GetContent activity. 

Before the assignment returned by the list view, the Assign-.GetNextWorkCriteria decision tree checks whether the assignment is ready to be worked on, and if the assignment was previously worked on by the user today. The assignment is skipped if it was previously worked on by the user today.

Get next work link can be added to user dashboard through OOTB case manager shortcuts widget.

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