Types of roles

TotalAgility supports fixed and floating roles.

Fixed roles

Fixed roles are the roles where role members are not likely to change in the immediate future. For example, a company usually has only one Finance Director; an organization may have five Executive Engineering Supervisors.

Use fixed roles:

  • When the number of members for the roles is not likely to change. A fixed role can have multiple members but cannot have a group or another role as a member.

  • When a task within a process will be performed by a known set of role members (case workers) who are not likely to change, and you know who they are.

During design, any changes made to a fixed role impacts all new and existing jobs created from any version of that process.

For example, in the following illustration, Jake joins the Engineering Supervisor fixed role. He will immediately see all activities assigned to this role in all live jobs for the Approve Site Design process.


Example of types of roles

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.

See Create a role.