Assignments: Batch Assignments

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
• Assign by Submission Group (Dynamic Assignments)

 

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 conduct these assignments is for the system to do it randomly.  If you know, for example, that each member should review three submissions, instead of going through each member or submission manually, you can have the system randomly, or batch, assign based on the ratio of submissions:members you provide.

Setup Process

Setup 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 Batch Assignments. 

Batch Assign

Batch Assignments are used to speed up the process of manually assigning reviewers to submissions according to a specific set of criteria. 

Fields	Description
Submission Group	Choose a submission group that is involved with this process. Assignments will be limited to this group.
Assign By	Choose whether to assign by reviewer or by entry (submission).
# 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.
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.

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 community leadership group, but already underwent assignment via this process, the assignment will not be deleted.