Assign Assignment Group and Assigned To at the Same Time

[johnfeist]

In Incident, when I open the reference list for assignment group, I can open a particular group and it shows the members of that group.   Is there a setting that will allow me to set both the assignment group and assigned to by selecting the person from within the group?

Thanks for any information you can provide.

John

[Dave Smith1 · Accepted solution]

Is there a setting that will allow me to set both the assignment group and assigned to by selecting the person from within the group?

No, because a person could belong to more than one group.

However, I'd question why you're doing it this way.   The intention is for someone to assign tickets to a group, then let that group view them in "My Groups Work" and take assignment of the ticket itself - i.e.: the assignment group simply works as a filter for functional escalation, getting it to the right department then not worrying who takes care of it after that (other than it will be taken care of).

An alternative is to look at the Assignment Lookup Rules, which can auto-assign groups based on ticket criteria.

[johnfeist]

Thank you Dave.   What you are saying synchs with my thinking.   I'm still pretty new to ServiceNow and had a user raise the question.   I decided to ask rather than assume.

[Dave Smith1]

You'll actually be surprised at how many people ask the same question!   Essentially they're unfamiliar with the overall Incident Management process, which normally follows:

1. someone raises an incident - could be portal, self-help, mobile, support agent, automated, etc...
2. incident is categorised - think "which affected service".   This should guide the following:
3. urgency is usually influenced by SLA levels and category - the SLA will normally define the importance of a service
4. impact and urgency determines priority - so the more widespread, the more it gets shunted up the queue
5. incident is assigned to a group of people best suited to investigation (the assignment_group part).   Category/subcategory usually indicates where it should go, and this can be automated by Assignment Lookup Rules so there's less manual decision-making
6. a group spots the incident showing up in "My Group Work"
7. someone in that group will take responsibility, assigning it to themselves and work the ticket - the assigned_to part.

It's perfectly possible that an individual can be assigned, leap-frogging the group stage.. but if that person suddenly becomes unavailable there will be overlooked tickets.   At least with a group assignment first, the group still has visibility of those tickets and can reroute as before.   Leaving the group blank and clearing out the assigned agent means no idea of whom else could step in.

Hope that helps!

[johnfeist]

Thanks Dave.   That is a very good explanation.   The user who asked the question was looking to save two mouse clicks by assigning the group and individual at the same time.   There can be cases where that makes sense but I suspect they are few and far between.   I'm also dealing with change management issues.   Not the kind that SN addresses, the process of getting people out of their set way of doing things and accustomed to a new and hopefully better way.