When you assign Tasks to your Users, you want to ensure the workload is spread evenly throughout your Users. One way of doing so is to use Round Robin assignment. While Round Robin assignment distributes the Tasks evenly and is simple, it may not consider the difficulty of different Tasks, the ability of your Users to complete those Tasks in the same time or a User’s availability during meetings or vacations.
For example, let’s say Bluespring uses Round Robin assignment for our Sales Representatives to contact existing Customers about a discount opportunity on an upgrade, where the discount expires today. We assign 10 Tasks to 5 different Sales Reps. One Representative encounters a Customer who has had difficulties with her existing version and insists the Sales Rep inventory all of her problems, occupying the Representative for several hours. In the middle of the afternoon, this Representative has 7 remaining Tasks and not enough time in the day to complete them. So, in order to complete all of the day’s work, a Manager must now reassign the Tasks to other Sales Representatives, making more work for the Manager.
Fortunately, BPM provides us with an alternative to Round Robin assignment: Queues. A Queue is a group of people who are eligible to work a Task. Tasks appear in a List and your Employees “take” a Task, work the Task, complete the Task and then return to the List to take the next Task. When an Employee needs to take extra time to complete a Task, such as in our example above, other Employees will take more Tasks without a Manager needing to reassign the Task. If an Employee is on vacation or involved in a meeting, you don’t have to update anything: other Employees will continue to work Tasks in the Queue. When you have a lot of Tasks in a Queue, a Manager can see the additional work load and have more Employees work that Queue. Queues even help you understand which Employees are more efficient, because you can write reports to see which Employees complete more Tasks or average less time to complete a particular Task.
So, the next time you are thinking of using Round Robin to assign Tasks, think of the advantages of using a Queue!
