RE: Re-assignment

MikeLockwood · ‎Mar 17, 2010

In our regulated industry, delegation ofthe grant of authority to approve for a certain role isa legal, auditable event (used when someone is on vacation for example).

We have been manually re-assigning all assignments for while, adding appropriate re-assignment comments, which are duly recorded in the system and are acceptable.

We recently trained all users on the Calendar delegate function and enabled it. Now we come to find that Windchill does not record this in the same way - an assignment bounced to another user via the calendar delegate function does not show in the re-assignment record. It appears that we now have to elminate the use of the Calendar delegate function - major disappointment.

Interested in how others handle this.

rmp.pe · ‎Mar 18, 2010

Mike,

I chuckled when I read the subject of your post in my daily summary email, because I knew exactly what you'd be asking about before I even read your message. We fought this fight with PTC during our 9.1 upgrade project and got nowhere with them. The biggest frustration was in making them understand that calendar reassignment and manual reassignment are doing the same thing... they never seemed to get that.

We put together a document to try to explain this to them. Here is an excerpt:

Requirement

Reassignment of signatures, when reassigned only once or reassigned several times through a chain of users, shall be completely traceable through the details page for the object being signed.

OOTB Behavior

Reassignment of tasks is defined as taking a task which has been assigned to you and reassigning it to an alternate user to complete. This can be accomplished three ways:

Manual reassignment by the user ... I explicitly and intentionally assign this task to another user
Manual reassignment by the Product/Library Manager ... The Product/Library manager explicitly and intentionally assigns this task which was originally assigned to me to another user
Automated delegation of tasks ... I will be away from the office and have configured my calendar to intentionally assign all tasks I receive within a certain timeframe to another user

All three of these mechanisms have the same result: a task which was originally assigned to one person has been reassigned to someone else. 
Solution
Reassignment of tasks using the Calendar delegation method must be traceable. Ideally, this will be traceable via the same mechanism as is used today (the Reassignment History report on the details page of the object). It may be acceptable however (depending on the solution) to provide this traceability another way. The important part is not where it is displayed, the important part is that it is recorded and CAN be displayed somewhere.
Our steering team determined that we could not afford to have approval assignments languishing away in people's inboxes while they are away from the office, so disabling the calendar was not an option for us. If you think about it, it is the traceability that is the issue, not the display. It is not traceable through the normal interface (i.e. the reassignments table on the doc/parts details page), but you can view someone's calendar to see when they delegated something in the past (if they did not go back and modify their calendar after the fact).
Regards,

Robert M. Priest, PE, PMP
Engineering Manager
STERIS Corporation
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http://www.steris.com