Modifying Work Notes to Reflect Accurate Assignment Process in Incident using AWA feature

[Tamizh Nesan1]

Hello Community,

I’m seeking guidance on an issue related to incident assignment in ServiceNow using the Advanced Work Assignment (AWA) feature. Currently, when an incident is assigned to a user via AWA, a message is appended to the work notes suggesting that the user has self-assigned the incident. This is misleading, as the assignment was actually performed by AWA, not by the user themselves.

We believe it’s crucial for the work notes to accurately represent the assignment process, as they serve as a historical record of the incident’s lifecycle.

To address this, we’re considering the creation of a ‘Before’ business rule script that would append a message to the work notes indicating that the assignment was performed by the AWA feature.

Could anyone provide guidance or share experiences on how to best implement this? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you in advance for your assistance.

[Chris D]

@Tamizh Nesan1 did you ever implement this? 

This is something that was just requested by a customer and honestly not something I've noticed before, but I agree that it's at least potentially misleading, particularly if using AWA auto-assignment.

I'm not 100% confident on the most efficient way to identify whether a task assignment is done by AWA, but the awa_work_item table is definitely one way...

Just spitballing here, since a BR running on the Task table itself would be massively inefficient, possibly the best route could just be a BR - async should be fine* - on the awa_work_item table when State changes to Accepted. If you just wanted to add this note for auto-assignments (which would be my preference I think), you could add the condition Assignment Rule.Enable Auto Assign = true. And then the BR just needs to do a simple GlideRecord lookup of the associated document and add the desired Work Note.

*edit: actually, if you have notifications enabled for the Assigned To of newly added Work Notes, you may want this to be a Before BR and hopefully get the Work Note added to the Task before the Task is assigned by AWA - it's possible the AWA timing wouldn't work out for this but hopefully it would. If not, then I'm afraid a Before BR on the Task table may be the only option - but I would advise against that inefficient design.