Metro On Cloud

Tips & Tricks: Advanced Work Assignment

  [madrid] use the servicenow® advanced work assignment (awa) feature to automatically assign work items to your agents, based on their availability, capacity, and optionally, skills., awa pushes work to qualified agents using work item queues, routing conditions, and assignment criteria that you define. agents see their assignments in their agent workspace inbox., customers use different channels to request service, for example, chats, cases, or incidents. requests from customers create task or interaction records that store information about these objects, called work items., awa automatically routes work items to queues that focus on certain types of support, using criteria (such as priority or customer status) that you provide. queues can be defined based on need or type, for example product or critical cases. you also identify the agent groups responsible for work in the queue. awa then applies assignment rules that you set and uses agent availability, capacity, and skills (if defined) to assign work to the most qualified agent..

servicenow awa assignment rule

Advanced Work Assignment components

  service channels, a means of providing customer service. awa offers base system channels for chats, cases, incidents, and walk-up centers. for each channel, you can set attributes such as agent capacity and utilization conditions to control the work handled in the channel., a single piece of work to be handled by an agent from start to completion. for example, one chat or one case are objects that are routed and assigned to agents., work item queues, a queue stores a work item for a specified service channel. awa admins can create queues that focus on certain types of support within the channel, such as vip customers or critical cases. awa routes work items to queues based on specific conditions or requirements that you define, such as customer status, or region. groups assigned to each queue handle the incoming work items. once work items are placed in a queue, awa can then assign items to available agents based on assignment rules and agent availability and capacity., assignment groups, agents belong to specific groups that are organized by the type of work assigned to them. you provide details about an assignment group including the name and description, manager, and group email. you can also set up roles, groups and group members, queues, and agent capacity overrides for agents in an assignment group., assignment rule, criteria that determines how work items are pushed to the appropriate agent within a qualified assignment group., agent capacity, the maximum number of work items on a particular service channel that an agent may actively work on at one time., agent availability, states that indicate agent presence and whether the agent is available for work or is busy or offline. awa uses the agent availability state to determine if an agent is able to receive work., inbox layout, a configuration tied to a service channel that defines which fields of a record representing a work item are shown in agent inboxes. a layout defines what the agent sees in agent workspace., advanced work assignment roles, awa adds the following roles for users who configure, manage, and receive work assignments..

Basic process for configuring AWA

Users with the awa_admin role determine:, what to route – configure the base service channels to be used., where to route – define the work item queues and the routing rules, execution order, work item sort order, and strategy, how to assign work items – define the assignment rules that determine the work items pushed to agents, what the agent sees – set the inbox card layouts and presence (availability) states that agents use in their agent workspace, for more information: https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/madrid-servicenow-platform/page/administer/advanced-work-assignment/concept/awa-overview.html.

Finite Partners

Understanding Advanced Work Assignment – Not Every ServiceNow Module Uses Groups

servicenow awa assignment rule

With the ServiceNow Advanced Work Assignment (AWA) application, work is directly delivered to agents’ inboxes, so they don’t have to choose work items from queues manually. AWA routes and assigns work items automatically based on agent skills , capacity, and availability. By using assignment criteria, routing conditions, and work item queues that you define, AWA pushes work to the most qualified agents. Agents, on the other hand, use their AWA inbox to see their work items, accept or reject work items, and set their availability.

To request service, customers can use different channels, such as incidents, cases, or chats. Requests from customers create interaction or task records to store information about work items. Using criteria that you provide, Advanced Work Assignment routes work items to queues that focus on specific types of support. Users can define queues based on type or need, as well as identify the agent groups responsible for work in a certain queue. Then, AWA applies pre-set assignment rules to assign work to the most qualified person.

Components of Advanced Work Assignment

  • Work Items are defined as any type of single piece of work that needs to be handled by an agent. For example, one case or one chat is a work item or object that gets routed and assigned to an agent.
  • Service channels . AWA offers multiple base system channels for incidents, cases, chats, and walk-up centers. Service channels are a means of providing customer service. Assignment rule . Pre-set criteria that determine how objects will be pushed to the right agent within a certain assignment group.
  • Assignment groups . Groups are organized by the type of work that’s assigned to them, and every agent belongs to a group. You provide a name, description, manager, group email, and other details about a group. You also set up roles, queues, group members, and agent capacity overrides.
  • Work item queues. A specific type of work item for a service channel is stored in a queue. AWA routes work items to appropriate queues, based on specific requirements and conditions that you define.
  • Inbox layout . A configuration that defines which field of a work item is shown in agent inboxes.
  • Agent capacity and availability . Agent capacity refers to the maximum number of work items that an agent may work on at one time. Agent availability indicates agent presence and whether he or she is available for work, offline, or busy.

The Main Benefit of Using AWA

The main benefit of using AWA is increasing customer satisfaction rates. Advanced Work Assignment will help your clients assign work to the right agent more easily and in a shorter time period. Also, it means that an agent will have more time to resolve their requests. Because work assignments are set up based on agent’s skills, availability, and capacity, you will be sure that agents are available and have the right skills to fulfill a request with a high-quality solution in mind.

Reach out to Finite Partners if you need assistance with using ServiceNow and any of its integrations. Feel free to call us or ask a question on Twitter .

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servicenow awa assignment rule

ServiceNow® Advanced Work Assignment (AWA) - a clever automation of your workload distribution

servicenow awa assignment rule

The proper distribution of tickets and workload is a key factor in providing rapid resolution and enhanced user experience in all enterprises. It used to be that assignments would go through several iterations and many conversations, sometimes even with end-user involvement, until the task finally landed on the proper agent to work on it. All of this is time-consuming, error-prone, and both a bottleneck and a single point of failure in the process. As an illustration of the nature of the challenge, consider the steps involved in finding an agent with the appropriate language skills in a multi-language environment.

The ServiceNow® Advanced Work Assignment (AWA) feature is a way to cleverly automate your workload distribution. Assigning work items to your agents is based on their availability, capacity, and optionally, skills. AWA uses queues, routing conditions, and assignment criteria to select the best-qualified agent for the task.

AWA Overview

Figure 1. AWA Overview (Source: https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/paris-servicenow-platform/page/administer/advanced-work-assignment/image/awa-overview-flow.png)

AWA was introduced with the Madrid release in early 2019 as a way to manage agents’ ITSM tasks. In recent releases, it has become available across the whole platform to take advantage of the huge benefits it offers.

AWA functionality is available and embedded into the Workspace environment, which is an advanced UI created and enhanced for fulfillers and agents. There is a dedicated inbox section where fulfillers and agents can monitor incoming tasks and requests. Agent availability is set according to their schedules and includes omnichannel presence, but the system also allows the agent to set their presence across one or more channels.

Agent availability

Figure 2. Agent availability in Workspace Inbox

Customers can interact with ServiceNow through different service channels such as incidents, cases, walk-ups, and chats. When the customer makes a request, a work item is created. This is a single piece of work that can be handled by an agent from start to finish.

Advanced Work Assignment allows the system to push work to agents. It uses configurable criteria to automatically route work items to queues that focus on various support channels. This lets the platform enforce assignments to the proper group or agents.

Queues collect and store a specific type of work item for a dedicated service channel. Queues can be configured to focus on a certain type of support, such as VIP customers or critical cases. AWA routes work items to queues based on specific conditions or requirements that you define, such as customer status or region. Groups assigned to each queue then handle the incoming work items. Once work items are placed in a queue, AWA can assign items to available agents based on assignment rules, agent availability, and capacity. In each queue, there is a possibility to set a timer that allows agents to respond to the work item.

Agent capacity is also configurable. Agent capacity is the maximum number of work items on a particular service channel that an agent may actively work on at one time. Another characteristic that is measured and managed by the platform is the agent affinity. There are three major types of affinities:

  • Historical affinity, in which AWA tries to identify the best agent based on the agent's history of serving the same customer;
  • Related task affinity, in which AWA tries to identify the best agent based on the agent's past assignments on related tasks.
  • Account team affinity, in which AWA tries to identify the best agent based on the agent's responsibility or role in the account team.

If multiple rules are relevant, they can be ordered to be able to achieve the maximum result for this capacity.

Another adjustment is the possibility to set up the layout of the inbox. This is set in a configuration tied to a service channel that defines which fields of a record representing a work item are shown in agent inboxes. A layout defines what the agent sees in their corresponding Workspace area.

Workspace with 2 items

If a work item is rejected, the agent must provide a reason, such as being in a phone call with another customer. When a rejection occurs or the job is timed out, the work item is returned back to the queue to find the next available agent. Whenever an entry is missed by an agent or is timed out, AWA automatically marks the status of the user to ‘away’ to avoid sending additional assignments to them until they are available again.

After an agent accepts a work item, all relevant information is available to them, including historical data. During fulfillment, there may be a need for additional skills to complete the request; in this case, rerouting is an option.

Skill-based routing and assignment is an advanced part of AWA. One example of its usage is when a chat is initiated from a specific location, a required language skill can automatically be added to the conversation. This means that there is no need for separate dedicated queues only to the required skill - availability and capacity should be measured to properly route this work item.

AWA Overflow Strategy is another key feature. It automatically kicks in when one of the channels becomes overloaded - a backup group of agents can be utilized to work on the items. In this instance, cases are automatically routed to secondary or tertiary support groups to help take on work. There are two major benefits that this brings: First there is no proliferation of separate queues, which offers simpler queue management. Secondly, the work item stays in the queue, which means the integrity of the queue reports and work item reports is maintained. This is a very powerful concept which few competing products can match.

Advanced Work Assignment provides dedicated reports and dashboards, which enable managers to monitor work item handling so that agents can better support customer needs.

Advanced Work Assignment

Figure 4. Advanced Work Assignment dashboard for Operations

The helpdesk or call center manager and team leads are the most experienced people within the team and their time is critical. By utilizing this feature they can be freed up from manual assignment to focus on monitoring, coaching, and training agents, which would be a better use of their time.

From a customer standpoint, there is less wait time and improved customer satisfaction, also known as CSAT.

This article was written by  Bulcsu Boros , Principal ServiceNow Consultant at GuideVision.

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Handling Assignment Rules in ServiceNow

In ServiceNow, if one is looking for automatic assignments then he can rely on the instance’s ability to assign the tasks automatically to different users and groups depending on the specified conditions. In order to achieve this, ServiceNow has the following modules:

  • Assignment Lookup Rules
  • Assignment Rules

Assignment Lookup Rules:

This module appears under the ‘System Policy application’ menu. This table is basically generated out of the box as its definition is provided in the ‘Data Lookup Definition’ table in the instance, specifically for field assignments in the incident table. Assignment lookup rules mainly provide the functionality of changing any field value and not just the assignment fields.

Assignment Rules:

This module appears under the ‘System Policy application’ menu. It helps to automatically assign the tasks to a particular user or a particular group using the assigned_to and assignment_group fields respectively, depending on the specified set of conditions. One can define these assignment rules readily for their desired table.

Following are the steps for defining the assignment rule:

  • Navigate to System Policy -> Assignment -> New

Handling Assignment Rules in ServiceNow

  • From the above figure, one can see that the dot-walking can also be done in the condition builder field. Just select the ‘Show Related Fields’ option in the condition and then select the appropriate attribute.
  • Further, in the ‘Assign To’ tab, select the appropriate user and group to whom the task is to be assigned.

If two assignment rules conflict, then the assignment rule with the lowest execution order runs first. The lower the execution order, the higher is the precedence.

Distinguishing Factors between the Data Lookup Rules and Assignment Rules:

Precedence among the assignment rule and business rule:

In certain circumstances, the business rules gain precedence over the assignment rules.

The business rules and assignments rules run in the following order:

  • All the ‘before record insert’ business rules having order less than 1000.
  • First and foremost, assignment rule with lowest execution order and matching condition.
  • All the ‘before record insert’ business rules having order more than 1000.
  • All the ‘after record insert’ business rules.

We are pretty sure that this blog must have given an overview of dealing with Assignment Rules in ServiceNow.

Any comments\suggestions are most welcome. We have posted further blogs as well on other topics and will frequently come back with something innovative.

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Advanced Work Assignment with Skill Level Evaluation

Hi, I have a scenario where we must route the incidents using the AWA based on skills and skill levels. Everything was set according to the ServiceNow instructions. When the incident is created, the BR is executed, and the skill/skill level requirements are created in the task_m2m_skill correctly according to the skill determination rules. Then, the Work item is created on the AWA table, and the ticket is routed, honoring the skill requirement according to the assignment rule. However, the engine does not evaluate the ticket skill level. If the ticket requirement is an expert (lvl = 4), the agents with a basic level (lvl =1) are assigned. BTW the checkboxes "Enable skills", "Enforce mandatory skills", and "Evaluate skill level" are set to true, and the record on the table task_m2m_skill was created with the flag mandatory set to true as well. Any thoughts?

Thanks, Lucas Andrade

The rise of 'shadow stand-ins'

The brazen new way employees are cheating their way to the top

servicenow awa assignment rule

Remi never intended to secretly outsource her job. It sort of just happened.

After graduating from college in 2019 with a degree in education, the Gen Zer found work at a Chicago publishing company. She did not love it. Most of her colleagues were decades older than her, and their struggles to use basic software forced her to become a one-woman IT operation. The work itself was uninspiring and relentless: On most days she juggled presentation slides, managed spreadsheets and databases, and formatted page layouts.

The pandemic provided a respite from the tedium of in-office interactions. But it didn't lessen her workload, and she quietly began asking her boyfriend, a STEM major working in a lab, for occasional help. Certain she'd be fired for it, she didn't tell her employer.

Then her mother died.

Remi was appointed executor of the estate, and settling her mother's affairs was a never-ending nightmare: wading through countless gambling debts, maintaining the crumbling family home, and distributing the few remaining assets. Though she took a leave of absence from work and continued to rely on her boyfriend when she returned, she couldn't keep up. Soon, she also turned to a childhood friend, who was unemployed and needed money. Remi proposed a plan: She'd pay her friend $100 a book to help with editing and formatting, saving her hours of work every week. The friend eagerly accepted. Her colleagues, meanwhile, remained clueless .

And just like that — although she didn't know it — Remi had become part of a hidden movement that went far beyond her Chicago publishing company.

Across the globe, a wave of workers are secretly outsourcing parts or all of their jobs. Labor has never been easier to invisibly offload, thanks to a perfect storm of factors: globalized social networks, ubiquitous software tools, and the pandemic . An inadvertent byproduct of the rapacious, profit-seeking impulse that drives our global economy, this corporate subterfuge stretches from high-powered Silicon Valley techies to legions of low-paid helpers in India and Pakistan.

Welcome to the world of shadow stand-ins.

Stories about covert outsourcing are nothing new. Essay mills and faux test-taking have become perennial problems in academia, and gig-economy workers are occasionally caught lending their accounts to friends. Walter Keane gained notoriety in the 1960s for passing off "big eyes" paintings by his wife, Margaret, as his own. In 2012, a Verizon engineer was caught farming out his work to a team in China so he could browse Reddit all day. But in most workplaces, the idea of hiring someone to do your job for you seemed so outlandish that The Onion satirized it in 2009 as the natural endpoint to globalization and American laziness.

I talked to dozens of players in the shadow stand-in economy, including people like Remi, hired helpers, and those who have watched colleagues or friends partake. (Citing reputational or professional risks, most spoke on condition of anonymity or asked to be identified only by their first or middle name.) Given its clandestine nature, it's difficult to know just how many people the network scoops up. But providers told me they had seen a surge in popularity since 2020, a consequence of the pandemic and its attendant remote-work revolution. The past four years have transformed workplace norms, liberating millions from commutes and precipitating a wave of alienation from professional life — while providing eye-watering opportunities for the hungry or unscrupulous.

"It becomes very easy for people to take the support when working from home," said one shadow stand-in who lives in India and who has been in business since 2019. "After the pandemic," said another from Pakistan, the industry "boomed."

There's no one model for how shadow stand-ins work, and practitioners use different terms: outsourcing, delegating, proxy work, subcontracting, virtual assistants, offshoring, or the delightfully euphemistic "job support." It ranges from doling out small tasks to providing someone login credentials for full remote access. Some people want a mentor, some want a crutch after using "proxy interview" services to cheat their way through the hiring process, and some just want the productivity guru Tim Ferriss' "4-Hour Workweek" on steroids. Others use the free time to rake in cash by working multiple jobs , a twist on the concept of overemployment.

Related stories

Though Remi recruited people she knew, shadow stand-ins are often sourced from a complex online web of faceless providers . Sites like Fiverr and Upwork are common conduits; a designer in the Southwestern US told me he would periodically hire two freelancers for the same job and discard the inferior work. Platforms like Facebook, Telegram, and WhatsApp are full of job support groups with thousands of members each. dedicated to matching providers and users. In one recent Facebook post, an Atlanta man struggling with his Salesforce-related job offered half his salary to anyone willing to quietly hold his hand through tasks and meetings. In another, a woman in San Jose, California, working for a major tech firm asked for help with a short programming assignment.

"Job support is nothing bad," Raj Kumar, the Bengaluru, India-based cofounder of Onlinejobsupport.net, told me. He simply sees it as an "advanced version of training." Like many professional job-support firms, his team often acts as a kind of black-market IT helpdesk, using screen-sharing software to dial in to their clients' computers for a few hours a day to give pointers as they work — or completing the work themselves if the client would rather be elsewhere.

You could hire shadow stand-ins in many workplaces, assuming your boss isn't looking too closely. But it's much more common in jobs in technology and IT. SaaS tools and tech services like Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Amazon Web Services have become the plumbing for our global economy, used by everyone from fast-fashion retailers to nonprofits, and their cookie-cutter systems make it easy for anyone with the right skills to quietly step in.

For the past few years, an American Java developer named Kevin has been living in Southeast Asia and outsourcing his jobs — all three of them. With the help of a Filipino friend acting as a recruiter, he brought on three local "virtual assistants," offloading nearly all of his technical work. He writes formal assignment sheets for each worker; "Implement a test for valid JSON in POST content," reads a typical directive.

Needless to say, none of his employers — finance and construction firms — know about one another, and his workers are similarly in the dark. Even his location is a secret: He told his bosses he was based in the United States, and he works nights to avoid detection. "It's low-cost labor or low cost of living, mostly," Kevin explained. "I'm making three American incomes, but I'm paying Filipino rates to live."

He's an extreme example of a user of shadow stand-ins. But whether they're juggling multiple jobs or outsourcing the odd task, they tend to have one thing in common: a deep skepticism of traditional corporate values.

Some believe if the work gets done, no matter how unconventionally, there's no problem. "​​Everybody has a different moral compass and a different thing that they say: 'This crosses the line for me,'" said Andrew, a consultant in Colorado who has outsourced work to freelancers and family members. He views " quiet quitting " — deliberately coasting at work — as far more odious. "I don't believe somebody hires me for my time. They hire me to get results for them," he said.

Others, like the Southern California developer Brandon Nowak, have contemplated dipping their toe in the water. He told me that shadow stand-ins are an inevitable outcome to our system of making money. "Companies themselves are taking advantage of you, by hiring you to do work which they reap more value from you than they give to you. That is the basis of capitalism," he said. "I'm not an anti-capitalist necessarily, but I don't fault anyone — myself included — for looking to turn those tables on the companies themselves."

There is one wrinkle to this line of thinking. Some shadow stand-in connoisseurs — particularly those who ship their work to offshore helpers earning much less — are arguably replicating the same structures they're trying to rebel against.

"For-profit corporations are government-sanctioned psychopaths, existing only to predatorily and parasitically earn profit," Kevin said. "Corporations are owed no moral obligation whatsoever, any more than a hen owes a fox moral consideration. The only rational response is to extract as much as possible."

But, he conceded, "I readily admit I can't provide a consistent response to the problem of pushing predator-parasite further down the line."

Soon after hiring her friend, Remi had an awkward realization: They were bad at the job.

Sometimes, they made glaring errors. Reformatted manuscripts came back with page numbers inserted into paragraphs, or charts were missing data. Remi effectively demoted them, adjusting the arrangement to pay $10 for each individual chapter, but that created new problems: Since they took hours to complete what usually took her 30 minutes, she was effectively paying them less than minimum wage.

Their friendship suffered, too. "I'd give soft corrections on how I would like the work to be done, and they would be a little defensive about it, or wouldn't take the note," Remi said.

After two months, Remi decided to fire them, fibbing that she simply no longer needed help. She turned back to her boyfriend, who began working for her more consistently.

The dustup highlighted a key drawback to shadow stand-ins: While alluring, things can go horribly wrong.

Half a dozen workers at different companies in the US and India told me they knew of colleagues who had secretly outsourced work. Problems invariably piled up, they said: The work was inadequate; there were inconsistencies in communication; and organizational chaos abounded.

"If you can't trust your employee — if they're dishonest and they're not telling you the truth about one thing — that could mean that they're not telling you the truth about other things," said Amber Clayton, a senior director at the Society for Human Resource Management, an HR industry body. "I wouldn't want that individual within the organization, because who knows what they would do?"

Even when it goes right, managing a secret helper or two can be laborious. Your conventional workload may be lightened, but it's replaced with finding and vetting helpers, delegating tasks, reviewing the completed work, and living in constant fear of being found out. "It required a lot of micromanaging," said a backend engineer in Pennsylvania who hired shadow stand-ins to help him juggle multiple jobs. "It's like you were working — but then on top of that, it became another task of just managing them."

Occasionally, the problems can have implications far beyond the workplace.

In December, Tim Woodruff, a ServiceNow developer in Washington state, got a curious LinkedIn message from a "consulting" firm. "We will send job applications to remote jobs and schedule job interviews for you," the message read. If he got the job, the firm promised to "attend everything related to programming." All he had to do for whatever role he landed was attend meetings, and give the firm half of his salary.

Woodruff despised workplace deception, even joining job support and proxy interview-focused Telegram groups to disrupt them in his spare time. "I'm autistic, and rules help me make sense of the world, and I don't like it when they're just ignored and no one seems to care," he told me. He decided to go along with the chicanery to see where it led.

He joined the firm's Slack channel and let it apply for jobs on his behalf, even attending some job interviews. He said he noticed a disquieting trend: Many of the jobs he was interviewing for had national security implications, including tech consultancies working with the Secret Service and the Department of the Treasury. Other applications were to financial institutions. Woodruff said he reported the firm to the FBI. (A bureau spokesperson said they couldn't confirm the existence of any investigations.)

Ranjan, a software engineer from Bengaluru, is regularly approached by job-support firms trying to hire him to work for their clients. "We will keep your name, all data confidential. We do not deduct tax from your salary," one recruiter wrote to him on LinkedIn. "Your package will be Beautiful, trust me."

The pitch hints at the stark economic power disparity that underpins shadow stand-ins, he told me: Most job support comes from countries like India and Pakistan, where wages are low and "desperate" workers will provide cheap labor. Pay rates for shadow stand-ins are "definitely more than what people earn in their regular payday, that's for sure," he said.

Despite mixed feelings about the practice, Kiran, a shadow stand-in based in Bengaluru, has continued to provide help because of the money he earns. "They are faking," he said of clients. He has watched, frustrated, as clients coast through high-paying jobs, lying about skills and taking job opportunities "which are supposed to be for honest people who are actually experienced."

Still, Western pay remains an alluring prospect to many. "I think it's a win-win situation," said Rahul, an Indian developer whose friends have provided job support and who is interested in doing it himself. "We get paid peanuts anyway, so this is an extra source of income. It usually pays better, too." Andrew, the Colorado consultant, argued that both parties agree on a price they're happy with. "I feel like I pay people fairly," he told me.

Peter Steele, a Michigan developer, has an Upwork account and receives unsolicited pitches several times a year offering to apply for and complete jobs using his name in return for a slice of salary. "They talk about how getting clients is extremely difficult when you're not based out of the United States," he said.

High demand has paved the way for intermediaries who match clients and helpers — a veritable nesting doll of outsourced hustle. Many of them aren't shy about their businesses: Kumar's job support firm Onlinejobsupport.net, for example, claims on its website to have more than 500 happy clients across 25 countries — focusing on popular systems or tools like Java, AWS, Hadoop, and React. (It might be wise to be skeptical of any one provider's marketing claims, but there's clearly a bustling ecosystem.)

Many of these intermediaries aren't shy about their business, either. You can even find some marketing their services on LinkedIn.

The pandemic years were a boom time for shadow stand-ins. Now the winds are shifting.

Return-to-office has forced some delegators to give it up — it's harder to screen-share and outsource tasks if you're sitting in a cubicle — while others are reduced to huddling with helpers after returning home. Providers told me they're feeling the pinch, but there's no putting the genie back in the bottle.

The model has been proved, the global supply chain is there, and worker attitudes have shifted. "If I died at my desk tomorrow, my job would be posted online before my funeral," said one Oregon worker whose colleague tried to outsource their job.

Others question why secret delegating might be stigmatized more than other tactics. "Assuming you are not sharing proprietary data," Andrew, the Colorado consultant, asked, "what is the difference from outsourcing your work vs using an AI or software tool to automate your work?"

And while shadow stand-ins feel like a uniquely modern, internet-enabled phenomenon, its roots run much deeper. "Historically, at least in certain trades, both in the US and other countries, the household unit was the unit employed to do the work," said Michel Anteby, a professor of management and sociology at Boston University. He offered up the New England spinning industry as an example. "No one really cared or tracked if it was the husband, the wife, the kids who are doing the job."

Remi fits neatly within that framework.

Her boyfriend, it turned out, was a great worker. He could swiftly complete technical tasks that usually took her all day, and she didn't pay him; they had already merged finances when her mother died. They continued the arrangement until she quit a year later. But even after she left, Remi received intermittent texts from old coworkers asking for help. She never replied. She had no interest in letting the company exploit her labor.

Today, the Chicagoan has no regrets. "I personally come from a background where I am very anti-corporation," she told me. "I don't personally see the harm in it — especially because if my company isn't going to do its best to keep me happy and healthy, and have my best interests in mind, then that falls upon me to ensure that that's happening for myself."

Remi now works in an education-related field. Her boyfriend is employed as a remedial tutor at a school, and she sometimes lends him a hand, formatting his presentation slides and doing other miscellaneous work.

His employer doesn't know, and the couple have no plans to stop.

Rob Price is a senior correspondent for Business Insider and writes features and investigations about the technology industry. If you have experience with shadow stand-ins, you can contact him via Signal/WhatsApp at +1 650-636-6268 or email at [email protected] .

About Discourse Stories

Through our Discourse journalism, Business Insider seeks to explore and illuminate the day’s most fascinating issues and ideas. Our writers provide thought-provoking perspectives, informed by analysis, reporting, and expertise. Read more Discourse stories here .

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servicenow awa assignment rule

  • Main content

Create an assignment data lookup rule

Automatically assign a record using Data Lookup and Record Matching.

Role required: assignment_rule_admin or admin

  • \n Navigate to All > System Policy > Rules > Assignment Lookup Rules . \n
  • \n Select New . \n
Table 1. Assignment Data Lookup fields
FieldDescription
CategoryThe category the data lookup matches against.
SubcategoryThe subcategory the data lookup matches against.
Configuration itemThe configuration item the data lookup matches against.
LocationThe location the data lookup matches against.
Assignment groupThe assignment group to assign the incident to.
Assigned toThe user to assign the incident to.
ActiveOption to run the rule or deactivate the rule.
OrderOrder in which the rule runs compared to other rules on the same table. The Data Lookup Plugin runs the rule with the lowest order and matching values.
  • \n Select Submit . \n

The rule assigns incidents to the values in the Assignment Group and Assigned To fields based on the values selected in the Category , Subcategory ,\n Configuration Item , or Location fields. A valid assignment lookup rule requires at least one matcher field and one setter field.

Assignment Data Lookup

  • Assignment rules module
  • Data lookup rules
  • Precedence between data lookup, assignment, and business rules
  • Workflow assignments
  • Create an assignment rule
  • Baseline assignment rules example

IMAGES

  1. Handling Assignment Rules in ServiceNow

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  2. Unveiling the future of UX in ServiceNow

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  3. ServiceNow® Advanced Work Assignment (AWA) Admin Experience

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  4. ServiceNow Assignment Rules Demystified

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  5. 29. Use cases of Assignment Rule in ServiceNow

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  6. ServiceNow Workforce Optimization & Advanced Work Assignment Overview

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COMMENTS

  1. Demystifying Advanced Work Assignment (AWA)

    This article provides information about AWA architecture that may help resolve your issue. Advanced Work Assignment (AWA) was introduced.

  2. Exploring Advanced Work Assignment

    Exploring Advanced Work Assignment - Product Documentation: Utah - Now Support Portal.

  3. How to route work items to agents in agent workspace based ...

    This article details the steps to make use of Advanced Work Assignment to route work items to agents in Agent Workspace based on the needed skills. For example, if a work item requires the language skill. Skip to page content Skip to chat.

  4. Product Documentation

    DeveloperBuild, test, and deploy applications. DocumentationFind detailed information about ServiceNow products, apps, features, and releases. ImpactAccelerate ROI and amplify your expertise. LearningBuild skills with instructor-led and online training. PartnerGrow your business with promotions, news, and marketing tools.

  5. Lab 01.06: Advanced Work Assignment for CSM

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  6. Routing and Assignment: Advanced Work Assignment and Agent ...

    ServiceNow Overview of Advanced Work Assignment and Agent Affinity and their implementation - Now Learning. Skip to page content. Value of Certification - A Now Learning Community Event. Interested in ServiceNow certifications and how they can light up your career trajectory? Join this information session featuring certification experts ...

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    ServiceNow Learn how to configure a new queue for a group to receive and be proposed with incoming chats using Advanced Work Assignment (AWA). - Now Learning

  8. Agent Chat & Advanced Work Assignment (AWA) Workshop ...

    For the most benefit, we recommend watching the Agent Chat & Advanced Work Assignment (AWA) Workshop playlist in order: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list...

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  12. How to troubleshoot AWA round robin assignment issue

    This article will brief on how to troubleshoot Advanced Work Assignment(AWA) assignment issue? especially for round-robin assignment scenario. Skip to page content Skip to chat. How to troubleshoot AWA round robin assignment issue - Support and Troubleshooting > Knowledge Base > Login here.

  13. Tips & Tricks: Advanced Work Assignment

    AWA routes work items to queues based on specific conditions or requirements that you define, such as customer status, or region. Groups assigned to each queue handle the incoming work items. Once work items are placed in a queue, AWA can then assign items to available agents based on assignment rules and agent availability and capacity.

  14. How to troubleshoot AWA round robin assignment issue

    Round-robin assignment: With AWA, we don't have any OOB "Assignment rule" named as round-robin. By default, in OOB, we get "Chat - Most Capacity" assignment rule as shown in the below screenshot, Here, you can change the "Assign by" to "Last assigned", then system will try to perform assignments in a round-robin fashion. That is when there are ...

  15. Understanding Advanced Work Assignment

    Using criteria that you provide, Advanced Work Assignment routes work items to queues that focus on specific types of support. Users can define queues based on type or need, as well as identify the agent groups responsible for work in a certain queue. Then, AWA applies pre-set assignment rules to assign work to the most qualified person.

  16. ServiceNow® Advanced Work Assignment (AWA)

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  17. AWA Assignment API

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  18. How to add skills to task records for rounting in Advanced ...

    This article covers how to associate skills to task records so that they will be considered in Advanced Work Assignment. Procedure 1) Setup an AWA queue with an assignment rule per our docs and check the

  19. Handling Assignment Rules in ServiceNow

    One can define these assignment rules readily for their desired table. Following are the steps for defining the assignment rule: Navigate to System Policy -> Assignment -> New. Fill in the appropriate details. The below figure is for reference: From the above figure, one can see that the dot-walking can also be done in the condition builder field.

  20. Skills Determination for Advanced Work Assignment question

    The auto assignment isn't working correctly even though the agents have the correct skills assigned to them. In the documentation the instructions for creating a skills determination rule says that each new rule you create must have a corresponding business rule, but it gives no examples of what this business rule is supposed to look like.

  21. Create an assignment rule

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  22. Advanced Work Assignment with Skill Level Evaluation : r/servicenow

    Everything was set according to the ServiceNow instructions. When the incident is created, the BR is executed, and the skill/skill level requirements are created in the task_m2m_skill correctly according to the skill determination rules. Then, the Work item is created on the AWA table, and the ticket is routed, honoring the skill requirement ...

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