Assigned to Multiple Groups

[davidslavkin]

What are the implications of ITIL users (Fulfillers) belonging to multiple assignment groups?

Thanks,

David

[Giles Lewis]

It is quite common and normal for the same individual to be a member of multiple assignment groups.

[davidslavkin]

Thank you but are there any implications as such? How do you accommodate reporting and metrics from multiple groups for one individual?

[Giles Lewis]

Both fields, Assignment Group and Assigned To, are stored in the Task table. As a result, there are no issues from a reporting or metrics perspective when a user is a member of multiple groups.

The only issue that can occur is if there is a business requirement to assign tickets to an individual when you do not know the group. This is not really a good idea and it is not how ServiceNow is designed to work. Best practice is to always assign the ticket to a group first, and then assign the ticket to an individual within that group. This functionality is built-in to ServiceNow. Once you select the Assignment Group, the Assigned To field will restrict you to members of the Assignment Group.

But suppose the Help Desk insists (for some bizarre reason) on doing it the other way around. Suppose they say: We want to assign the ticket to Bob, and have ServiceNow automatically figure out the group. Can you customize the system to do it? But if Bob is member of two groups, Group 1 and Group 2, then how can ServiceNow figure out which group to use? One solution to this problem is to customize the User table and add a "Primary Group" field. For Bob we designate his Primary Group as "Group 1". Then you can write a business rule on the back end that says: if Assigned To is supplied and Assignment Group is omitted and the Assigned To is a member of multiple groups, then assign the task to the Primary Group, which in this case would be Group 1.

Note that this is a somewhat convoluted customization which can be avoided by sticking to the best practice which is to always set the Assignment Group first.

[davidslavkin]

Thanks for the detailed breakdown. That makes sense. I'm all for following best practices and out of the box functionality whenever possible. I'll accommodate multiple group membership requests, for now.