Assignments: Batch Assignments

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 the Batch Assignment method.

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 create these assignments is for the system to do it randomly.  If you know, for example, that each member should review ten submissions, instead of going through each member or submission manually, you can have the system randomly assign based on the ratio of submissions to members you provide. This method is known as Batch Assignment. You can also assign a certain number of reviewers to each submission; this is helpful if, for example, you want each submission to have three reviewers.  Finally, you can choose to include only certain reviewers in the batch assignment process.

Setup Process

Setup a Review feedback process in the Program Manager & Assignments Settings, 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:

• 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 Batch Assignments. (Learn more about Manual Assignment and Automatic Assignment by Submission Group.)

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 Batch Assign.

Batch Assign

Batch Assignments are used to speed up the process of manually assigning reviewers to submissions according to a specific set of criteria. When Batch Assign is selected, the following page will be displayed with four options to define the batch assignment:

	Fields	Description
A	Submission Group	Choose a submission group that is involved with this process. Assignments will be limited to this group. (Learn more about setting up submission groups for review processes.) If no submission groups have been created for this Review Program, the only option will be "All Submissions."
B	Assign By	Choose whether to assign by reviewer or by entry (submission).
C	# of entries per	If Assign by Reviewer is chosen, then choose the number of entries that each reviewer should be assigned to. If Assign by Entry is chosen, then choose the number of reviewers that should be assigned to each submission.
D	Limit to specific reviewers	You can further limit the reviewers that can receive a batch assignment. This is useful if you need to limit a batch assignment to a specific committee or exclude certain individuals who are not available. Check this box to display a list of all reviewers, and then check the box next to each reviewer to include them in the Batch Assignment.

It's important to note that once a batch assignment is created, changes to the submission will not affect the assignment. For example, if the submission is changed so that it no longer is part of the submission group that was used to make the assignment, but already underwent assignment via this process, the assignment will not be deleted.

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