Task Assignment/Auto Task Assignment
Introduction
Task assignment logic is used within challenges and communities. It is done in a balanced manner that ensures all possible assignees in a given stage will receive equal or close-to-equal task assignments. These assignments are configured using the Graduation Tasks section of Administration.
How it Works
The assignment logic is focused at the stage level, ensuring that as ideas enter stages where tasks must be assigned, it is working to provide balance to the assignments. It detects which role group is configured in the Graduation Thresholds administration panel for the particular stage, and forms an assignment list based upon the order they were enrolled into the assignment group.
When one task type is assigned, task assignments are balanced across experts for each idea within the graduation stage. On occasion, experts can be assigned to the same idea in the next stage of the process. For example, experts 1,2, and 3 in the chart (Figure 1) below receive the review task assignments for idea 1 in both the Submission stage and the Crowd Validation stage. This is not guaranteed, however, and should not be expected. This is per the design of the system.
Figure 1
The behavior illustrated in Figures 1 and 2 should be expected when assigning one task type (Review, Evaluation, Approval, Evaluation Task) to one assignment group, such as Expert, Moderator, etc. If you are assigning two tasks in a stage to two different assignment groups, then you should expect the same balancing to take place. As long as each task type is being assigned to a single group, this will balance the numbers according to the expected behavior.
Figure 2
We are mindful that sometimes multiple task types are assigned to one group in a single stage. When this approach is configured, the system will seek to balance the sum of tasks assigned, not the individual tasks assigned. In other words, each expert will receive an equal or near-equal number of task assignments per stage, but the number of assignments per type won’t necessarily be balanced, as depicted in the chart below (Figure 3).
Figure 3