Participants

When a process designer creates a user task, they can define the participant(s) who performs the task at runtime. Participants are used to identify who or what performs an activity. For example, in a hiring process, a person (human participant) interviews the candidate and an email system (system participant) sends out an automatic follow-up reminder.

Participants are defined in the following ways:

• statically, by specifying one or more organizational entities - groups, positions, organization units or organizations.
• dynamically, by using runtime data to identify the required organizational entities.
• using expressions, by building a query that interrogates the organization model to identify the required organizational entities.

This flexibility allows a process designer to handle both simple and complex distribution scenarios without impact on the overall process design. For example:

• offer a user task to all Customer Service Representatives.
• allocate a user task to an accountant if the value to be signed off is less than $5000, but allocate it to an Accounts Manager if the value is $5000 or more.
• allocate a user task to a single loss adjuster who holds at least level 2 motor insurance certification and is based in the Chicago office.

There are two types of participant:

• user task participants represent the users who perform the work defined in user tasks. These participants must be defined as external references in an organization model used by the process, not as basic types.
• system participants are used to identify a task that is performed by the system.