Assignments: Automatic Assignments by Submission Group

When a program includes a review process, workspace administrators can use the Program Manager & Assignments tool to assign reviewers to submissions (or vice versa) for reviewers to submit feedback via a Review Portal. The process of determining who the reviewers are and assigning them submissions to review is not related to granting workspace access: external reviewers do not need access to your workspace to complete their feedback.

There are three methods of assigning submissions to reviewers:

• Manual Assignment
  • Manually assign by submission
  • Manually assign by member
• Batch Assignment
  • Batch assign by submission
  • Batch assign by member
• Automatic Assignments by Submission Group

This article covers Automatic Assignments by Submission Group.

 

Overview

Program Manager & Assignments allows administrators to limit Review Portal users' access to specific submissions, so as to avoid conflicts of interest, divide up many submissions equitably amongst several reviewers, and assign specialist reviewers to certain types of submissions. 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 defined by certain criteria by the Filter tool. Instead of assigning reviewers to groups individually or randomly, perhaps you have a full group of submissions that is defined by certain criteria that you would like one or more reviewers to look at. Using the Assignments by Submission Group feature, you can create a group and assign it to a reviewer; reviewers will be automatically assigned any submissions (e.g., application packages) that meet the filter criteria that determine that group. If individual submissions 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 in the Program Manager & Assignments Settings, defined by a filter. 

Next, set up a Review Process. For the purposes of using submission groups to make automatic reviewer assignments, you'll want to 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:

• A Linked Form field to the main submissions form. In many programs, for example, this is an application form.
• A Linked Form field that links to the Portal users form. For example, a review form must include a link to a Reviewers form, which contains the email address and other information of the reviewers who will can be assigned submissions to review.
• Text field for storing assignment tags. 
• Date field for collecting the review completion date.
• Three folders: Not Begun, In Progress, and Completed.

Save the Review Process.

Assignments

Making the review assignments occurs in the Program Manager tool, which you can access by selecting the Program Mgr & Assignments icon in blue Navigation toolbar (located in the upper-left of your Zengine workspace screen). (Note that this is not the same place where the Review Process and submission groups were set up, which is the Program Manager & Assignments Settings page.)

Doing so will bring you to the Program Manager Assignments page.

Select the Edit Assignments button for the Review Process for which you are setting up Assignments. (If you have not yet created any assignments, this button will display Create Assignments instead.)

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.)

Select the assignment method tab (which will display the current method selected; by default, this will be Assign by Submission when first entering a Process) and choose Assign by Submission Group.

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 that have been created for the Review Program.

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:

Any submissions that meet the filter criteria defined by the submission group will now be automatically assigned to all reviewers listed here.

Notes

• You can remove an assignment for reviews that have not been started. In Progress and Submitted assignments cannot be removed (although the corresponding records can be manually deleted from the review feedback form assigned to this Process). 
• When using the Assign by Submission Group method, you assign a reviewer to the entire group. This means that reviewers can only be unassigned from the full submission group rather than individual submissions.
• Throughout the process, you can return to this tab to keep track of the reviewers' 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. 
  • You can also select Assign by Member from the assignment method tab to see a list of all reviewers, regardless of the method their reviewers were assigned, to track their progress.
• When a submission is created or updated so that it matches the Process stage and submission group criteria, the system will automatically assign the submission to each of the reviewers who have been assigned to that submission group. 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.

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