What is the purpose of using Assignment Groups and are they needed for managing project tasks?

[beself]

What is the purpose of using Assignment Groups and are they needed for managing project tasks? Our System Admin currently has Assignment Groups as a mandatory field when creating a project task. However, I am finding that this is an issue since my resources are unique to a project and not in any of our Department or Company groups (e.g. Third Party Vendor resource). What is the purpose of using an Assignment Group (what is it reporting on? what is it linked to?)? Is it needed for PPM? Project Tasks? How do other PMs assign their tasks? Are all your project resources tied to an Assignment Group? Or do you remove this field or make not mandatory? Do you only use Assigned To or an Assignment List? Do you create a new Assignment Group that would be specific to your project - so I would create a new Assignment Group just for my team members? Thoughts? Thanks!

[SanjivMeher]

Hi Barbara,

You need to create assignment groups so that you can assign a Project task to them.

In a Project, I can have multiple assignment groups. One for UI Development, one for workflow development, one for Testing, on for document.

So every group should have an assignment group in ServiceNow.

I as a Project Manager will assign a task to UI Development assignment group. Now it is the responsibility of the group manager or team lead to assign it to an individual, depending on workload on each resource. Project Manager may not know, what each individual is doing. So he will only assign it to the group.

[beself]

Thanks Sanjiv for your reply. The issue I have is that I have team resources that are temporary and not part of our company - for example we might contract a developer from an outside company. As such, this person would not be an employee and not in one of our assignment groups. The assignment group we have for Developers is only for company employees. I considered creating a generic assignment group for Vendors but it would not contain any names. Not sure if that would serve any purpose though. So I am trying to get a better understanding on why the Assignment Group is required, what is the purpose and if I should many not mandatory so I don't have to use it in these cases.

[SanjivMeher]

Hi Barbara,

It depends on the organization. If it has been designed to have assignment group mandatory organization wide, you may need to create one for your contractors.

I always prefer having them in a group. This way I don't have to search the whole organization directory to search for my contractor. I can just select the group and it will only give me users, who belong to that group. It can help you in reporting and also to delegate work to another member in that group, if the assigned person is absent.

Also there could be other Projects using the same functionality, and they may want it to be mandatory.

[Michael Fry1]

Pondered the same question when I was rolling out Project. We decided it wasn't needed since the Resource Plan identified which resources were working on the Project. We then added an Assignment List so we could assign users from the Resource Plan to the appropriate tasks and so they could log time against the task.