Matching criteria for work items in Work scheduler
Summarize
Summary of Matching criteria for work items in Work scheduler
The assignment workbench in ServiceNow’s Work Scheduler uses configurable matching criteria to evaluate and rank agents within a selected group for task assignments. These criteria help optimize agent selection based on factors like skills, availability, and workload balance, ensuring efficient and fair work distribution.
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Types of Matching Criteria
- Simple Match: One-to-one matching, such as aligning an agent’s time zone with a task location’s time zone.
- Aggregate: Uses queries with filters and aggregates (e.g., counting assigned tasks) to return sets of users.
- Scripted: Employs scripted queries to return a list of users based on custom logic.
Provided Matching Criteria Examples
- Availability Today: Calculates agent availability considering work schedules, assigned work, and personal time off; higher availability improves ranking.
- Matching Skills: Counts how many of the required skills an agent has; more matches raise the agent’s ranking.
- Matching Skills - Mandatory Skills Support: Filters out agents lacking mandatory skills and ranks the rest based on skill matches.
- Assigned Incidents: Counts incidents already assigned to an agent; more assigned incidents lower the ranking.
- Last Assigned: Prioritizes agents based on the recency of their last assignment to balance workload.
Configuring Matching Criteria
When creating matching criteria, you select the type and configure related fields and filters. These criteria are then assembled into matching rules used by the assignment workbench to rank agents.
For each criterion, you can specify:
- Ranking and Display Usage: Define if the criterion is used for ranking, display only, or both.
- Ranking Method: Choose if “more is better” (e.g., availability) or “less is better” (e.g., assigned incidents).
- Weight: Assign importance by weighting criteria; default is 10 but can be adjusted.
- Threshold: Set minimum requirements (e.g., minimum skills or hours available) to filter agents.
- Active/Inactive Status: Enable or disable criteria dynamically, immediately affecting rankings.
How Agent Ranking Is Calculated
The workbench calculates an overall ranking score for each agent by:
- Calculating a normalized value for each criterion (e.g., skills matched / maximum skills needed).
- Multiplying each normalized value by its criterion weight.
- Dividing by the total of all criterion weights.
- Summing these weighted results to get the final ranking score.
Agents are then ranked from highest to lowest score, guiding task assignment decisions.
This method ensures a balanced evaluation considering multiple factors, helping ServiceNow customers assign work efficiently while respecting skill requirements and workload distribution.
The assignment workbench uses configurable matching criteria, such as skills and availability, to evaluate the agents in a selected group and provide an overall ranking.
- Simple Match: creates one-to-one matching, such as matching the time zone of an agent with the time zone of a task location.
- Aggregate: uses a simple query and returns an aggregate result. For an aggregate type, select a table and create a filter, and then select an aggregate field such as the Assigned to field. This type of query returns a set of users.
- Scripted: uses a scripted query which returns a list of users.
- Availability Today: Availability is calculated based on the agent's work schedule, assigned work, and personal time off. The more availability an agent has, the higher the contribution to the agent's overall rank.
- Matching Skills: The number of agent skills that match the skills required for the incident. The more skills that match, the higher the contribution to the agent's overall rank.
- Matching Skills - Mandatory Skills Support Calculates the number
of agent skills that match the mandatory skills. It does this by filtering out all agents
who do not have the mandatory skills and ranks the remaining agents. The more skills that
match, the higher the contribution to the agent's overall rank. Note:If using the mandatory skills feature, use the Matching Skills - Mandatory Skills Support criterion to match agents with the Configuring the mandatory skills feature identified for an incident.
- Assigned Incidents: The number of incidents already assigned to this agent. The more incidents assigned, the lower the contribution to the agent's overall rank.
- Last Assigned: For the sake of balancing assigned work, prioritized the agent based on the last assigned work.
To create matching criteria, select the type and use the fields related to that type to build the query. After creating matching criteria, you can create a configuration for the assignment workbench by creating a matching rule of the type Selection criteria and selecting the desired matching criteria.
- ranking and display usage
- ranking method
- ranking weight
- threshold
- active/inactive
Ranking and display usage
- Ranking and display: uses the criterion to determine agent ranking and displays it in a column on the workbench.
- Display only: displays the criterion in a column on the workbench but does not use it to determine agent ranking.
- Ranking only: uses the criterion to determine agent ranking but does not display it on the workbench.
Ranking method
- More is better: for example, more availability is better when determining the agent ranking.
- Less is better: for example, fewer assigned incidents are better when determining agent ranking.
Weight
Each matching criterion has an assigned weight. By default, the matching criteria has an assigned weight of 10. You can assign a higher weight to the criteria that's more important.
Threshold
A threshold sets a minimum requirement for a criterion. For example, set the threshold of the Matching Skills criterion to 3 if you want to see only those agents who have at least three of the required skills for a task. For availability, set the threshold to the desired number of hours to display only those agents who have that minimum number of work hours available. You can set the threshold in the Select Criteria related list on the Matching Rule form. If necessary, personalize the list and add the Threshold column.
Active/Inactive
There can be several matching criteria associated with the matching rule that determines the assignment workbench configuration. Each individual criterion can be set to active or inactive. Changing this setting has an immediate impact on the agent ranking. You can make this change in the Select Criteria related list on the Matching Rule form. If necessary, personalize the list and add the Active column.
Calculating the agent ranking
- Calculate a number for each criterion.
- Multiply that number by the criterion weight.
- Divide the result by the total of all criterion.
- Repeat for each criterion and add the results.
- Matching Skills with Mandatory Skills Support: 5/6
- Availability Today: 7 hours
- Assigned Incidents: 2
- Matching Skills:
2 / 3 = 0.666(with 3 being the maximum number of skills) - Availability Today:
7 / 8 = 0.875(with 8 being the maximum number of hours) - Assigned Incidents:
2 / 26 = 0.0769(with 26 being the total number of tasks in the table) - Weight: each matching criteria has an equal weight of 10
((0.666 x 10) / Total of criterion weight (10+10+10)) + ((0.875 x 10) / Total of criterion weight (10+10+10)) + ((0.0769 x 10) / Total of criterion weight (10+10+10))(6.66 / 30) + (8.75 / 30) + (0.769 / 30)0.222 + 0.291 + 0.0256 = 0.53This calculation is performed for each agent in the assignment group. Agents are ranked based on the value of this calculation, with the highest number earning the highest ranking.