Distributing Work Within the Target Pool

Once you have identified the participants who are eligible to receive work items generated by a user task, BPM must identify the users within the target pool to send the work item to.

If the user task’s specified distribution method is:

  • Offer. BPM offers the work item to all users who are members of the specified organizational entity (or entities).
  • Allocate. BPM allocates the work item to the pool of users that the participant definition resolves to. It determines which user to use by selecting an allocation method. These are:
    • Round-robin. Work items are allocated to members in strict rotational order.
    • Random. Work items are allocated to members in random order.

Assign the allocation method from the General tab of the Properties view of the requisite organizational entity. BPM uses the allocation method you have assigned. If that entity does not have an allocation method, the allocation method defaults to Random.

Note: Work items can be assigned to an organizational entity (such as a position) using an RQL statement. RQL is dynamic, which means that if the items referred to by the RQL changes in some way (for example if the resources mapped to an organizational position are changed) then this will be reflected in the set of resources associated with the work item.

The work items assigned using an RQL statement do not appear in the Supervised Work List for the organizational entity (because the work items are offered to individual resources, not to the group being listed in the Supervised Work List). For example, if you define a Customer Services Representative position using resource query language, the work item is offered to each resource in the Customer Service Representative position but does not appear in the supervised work list.

If work items are offered to organization entities that contain no resources, the work item is scheduled, but will not appear in any worklists until a resource is mapped/added to the organization entity that the work item was offered to.

If work items are offered to organization entities that do not exist, the work item is scheduled to the undelivered group.

If you undeploy an organizational entity that is referenced by RQL and if work items are scheduled to that entity (or if work items are offered to organization entities which are deleted due to an organization model upgrade) then the work items transition to the pending state. To correct this the organizational entity must be redeployed. In this scenario an error will be logged and audited.

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