References

This section includes additional information on certain topics.

Working group

A working group is the group for which an individual does most of their work. If an individual belongs to multiple groups, a working group indicates the group for which the individual is currently working. For example, an individual may belong to both the Finance group and the Admin group. Assigning the individual to the Admin group indicates that the individual is currently working for the Admin group.

Skill levels

Managing training and competency records for a team or department members lets you optimize resource use. These records help you:

  • Assign work to an individual with the correct training and skill level. For example, a complex task most likely needs a resource with a high skill level.

  • Tailor support for team members based on their needs. For example, team members with lower skill levels may require additional supervision and training.

When adding new resources, define the skill level according to their competence. Skill levels are global and available across all business processes.

Skill levels range from 1 to 10, with 1 being the highest skill level and 10 the lowest. The lower the value, the greater is the skill level of the resource. By default, the minimum skill level is set to 10 and the maximum to 1.

Use the maximum and minimum skill levels of an individual to determine which activities he or she can perform.

  • When manually assigning work, only resources with the requisite competency levels to perform the work are available.

  • When automatically assigning work, TotalAgility only assigns resources that have the required skill level.

Specify whether resources are available based on server level or process level skill settings. Or, select resources regardless of skill level. .

At the process level, you can specify the skill level required to perform the job. See Resource assignment>Assign resources manually for more information.

Floating roles

Floating roles are the roles where the role members are added or updated depending on the task or job.

Floating roles are job-specific and allocated on a per job basis at runtime. For example, a new legal case may need to be assigned to a specific type of case worker. A drug case or a homicide case would require case workers who specialize in these fields. The case worker assigned depends on the actual job instance. You could use a web page to let a user populate the case worker role member dynamically at runtime or change role members at any time.

Use a floating role when the changes to the role members impact only a specific job that is based on a specific process.

Roles defined at the case level are automatically available to any fragments associated with the case. A change at the case level filters through to all activities in related fragments. In addition, you can also define a role at the case fragment level.

Work allocation rules

Work allocation rules are specific rule conditions to help prioritize work of a resource based on activity, process, state, work type, and other priority types. Once prioritized, TotalAgility systematically pushes the work to the resource work queue based on the set priorities.

You can assign a work allocation rule directly to an individual or a group so that the rule becomes effective for all individuals who have the selected resource group as their working group. For example, on the day when a bank releases the quarterly statements, the task of posting bank statements is assigned as a work allocation rule to the Backroom Staff. The system prioritizes the task by putting it at the top of the Backroom Staff work queues when the activity becomes pending.

Service Level Agreement

Service Level Agreement (SLA) is the visual representation of a threshold status or job state on a job list or work queue. Threshold statuses indicate if the job is within or has exceeded the set target duration.

TotalAgility supports a maximum of five statuses. Three statuses-Red, Amber and Green-are available by default. You can also include Black and Purple. See Configure the work process settings.

Green is the first and the default status. If additional SLA thresholds are not set, the status of the job remains Green until the current time exceeds the expected duration, and then the status changes to the last status, or Red.

For an SLA Status indicator to work effectively, define the thresholds in a decreasing order. For example, the Amber threshold should always be more than the Red threshold.

You can define the time relative to the expected duration when the job status should change state, such as from Green to Amber or to Red.

You can configure the state to change after the expected duration is met (Post). By default, the status changes before the expected duration is achieved.