March 27, 2011, 4:11 pm - James Farrer
I was thinking about a need at work in our ITSM Suite (we use Service-now.com but the problem has existed in our last couple of tools as well) and after tinkering with it for a while I came up with what I think to be a clever solution.
The challenge that we've had in several of our tools over the last number of years has been the ability to find the group for a user when assigning a task to someone (in this case an incident, but it is more generally applicable). Because the list of assignees is based on the group, things have typically worked like this: an incident is created and before they can save it they have to find who it should be assigned to, sometimes they know the group and sometimes they know the person to assign it to. If they know the group, then it's not too bad, but when they only know the person they have had to search through the groups one by one. In the past I created a seperate search utility that was flexible enough to use but still required jumping to a separate window to search and then manually coming back.
We are currently moving to Service-now for our incident tool and it has the ability to look up a person independant of the group which was the first step. It still didn't populate the group though, so we still needed some improvement. We could just look up the group, but in many cases people are part of multiple groups. We decided it would likely be worth setting it up so you could set a Primary Group for the user, but if that hadn't been done yet there was still a possibly random selection of the group. This is still better than nothing, but not ideal.
I finally had the idea to include an order field on the group. I could look up the groups a person is a member of and select the first one as the groups are ordered. This gives us a way to set the Primary Groups for almost everyone without requiring a Primary Group to be set beforehand. Since most of the duplicate groups are actually sub-groups of a larger group (often based on skills) this can be used the majority of the time.
Depending on the ordering of the groups there may still be some mostly random group assignments, but this will be more the exception than the rule. For cases where the general group ordering does not make sense they still have the ability to set a Primary Group for the user.
It only takes a few lines of scripting to implement the logic, is relatively maintainable and remarkably flexible. I'd say that qualifies for a good win.