Assignments: Automatic Assignments by Submission Group

When a process is private and permission-based, administrators can use assignments to determine those permissions. By setting up these permissions, users are granted different levels of access to data in the workspace, as determined by the administrator.  These are the methods of assigning:

• Manual Assignment
  • Manually assign by submission
  • Manually assign by member

• Batch Assignment
  • Batch assign by submission
  • Batch assign by member

This article covers Automatic Assignments by Submission Group.

 

Overview

Permissions and Assignments allow administrators to limit portal users' permission to specific submissions, so as to avoid conflicts of interest. Further, they can assign responsibility to each person involved in the process to review, provide feedback, and track the status of that feedback.  

One way to tailor these assignments is based on a group of submissions. Instead of assigning reviewers to groups in a one-to-one ratio, perhaps you have a full group of submissions that is pre-created that you would like a reviewer or reviewers to look at. Using the Assignments by Submission Group feature, you can create a group and assign it to a reviewer; if entries move into or out of that group, the assignments will be dynamically updated to reflect that.

Setup Process

First, you will need to create Submission Groups, defined by a filter. 

Next, set up a feedback process, then turn on the permission assignments feature by modifying the Permissions so that Members can only view submissions that are individually assigned to them.

Select the Feedback form. It is important that this form includes the following:

• Link to the Portal users form. For example, a review form must include a link to the reviewers form.
• Text field for storing assignment tags. 

Save the process.

Assignments

Click on the Program Manager tab in your Navigation bar. 

Click Edit Assignments for the Process for which you are setting up Assignments.

You can then choose the Assignments method that you want to use. In this article, we will focus on Automatic Assignments, referred to in the platform as Assign by Submission Group. Learn more about  Batch Assignment and Manual Assignment.

Once Assign by Submission Group is selected, you will see the following screen:

On the left, you will see a list of all Submission Groups created in the workspace.  Click the name of a group in order to select it.  You will then see this screen.

Click the green "Assign" button in order to find members of your workspace and assign them to this group.

Click the name of the relevant reviewer(s).  When you are finished, you will see a list that looks like this:

You can remove an assignment for reviews that have not been started. In Progress and Submitted assignments cannot be removed. 

Throughout the process, you can return to this tab to review the progress. This is important for ensuring that each submission is being fairly reviewed by the appropriate number of people and that no reviewers are falling behind. 

TIP! When a submission is created or updated so that it matches the process stage and submission group criteria, it will be assigned to each of those reviewers. If it is updated so that it no longer matches the submission group criteria, it will be unassigned from the reviewer, unless it's already in progress or complete.