Many organizations assign work to a role, such as a Project Manager, rather than directly to a named individual.

Using roles rather than naming individuals gives you more flexibility in that you may not know the name of the person who will perform a task, although you may know the role required.

In TotalAgility, you can assign work to one of the following:

• An individual, such as John Smith.

• A role, such as Finance Manager.

• An organizational group, such as Finance.

• An unknown resource, where you use a variable and the system identifies the resource at runtime.

• Someone previously involved in the process, such as the job creator or the person who performed a previous activity.

When designing a process, you can define a number of roles that are specific to that business process.

See Create a role.

You cannot use groups or other roles as role members. But an individual can belong to more than one role. Changing the members allocated to a role in one business process does not affect any other business processes in the system even if they have the same role name.

A role can be fixed or floating.

Once a role is created, assign a role to an activity. See Assign resources manually.

If the activity is an embedded process, it uses the role from the parent map (if the role already exists).

If the activity is a subjob, it uses the role created for the subjob and not from the parent map.