Workflow Setup participant task, ability to use a specific Role of the context team as a pool of users

[GregoryPERASSO]

In the setup participant task, we are able to define a pool of users to restrict the choice of potential assignees.

In this pool, we can add Users, groups or the Context team (= all users in all roles of the context team)...

It will be great if we can choose a specfic role of the Context team  in the pool.

[SteveVinyard]

We absolutely NEED this.  It is a very large gap and reduces the capability of Windchill to meet a specific need.  Every customer I work with that is doing workflows says "Hey I want the Select Participants pool to be ONLY the users in this SPECIFIC context role".  Right now we only have "groups" which aren't context specific or the context team which is everyone on the team a not what the customer wants at all.

[PradeepRao]

This is a capability that we are considering for a future release. Would it be possible to share some scenarios where this functionality is likely to be used?

Restricting the choice of participants for a task to members of a role is possible with the current functionality, though, perhaps, in a somewhat unintuitive fashion. If a role is designated as a participant for an activity, principals in that role in the context team are pre-populated into the matching role in the process team. A user assigned the Set Up Participants task would, in such a case, have to remove non-requisite participants from the role, instead of adding desired users into it.

Is usability the primary concern here? In that it would be more convenient to add a few users to an empty role rather than to remove a larger number of users from a pre-populated role?

If the capability to constrain the resource pool to principals in a resource pool was available, do you envision that the role and the resource pool for that role would be the same? Are there situations where you might want the resource pool to be a different role(s) from the target role?

[GregoryPERASSO]

Pradeep,

just see your scenario.  We did not see this scenario when discussing about that topic in february 2013 with you and Debbie.

The scenario can work, but prefer adding users to empty role, as we can control if the workflow if a selected User is mandatory. The risk is that the user how have to setup participants just clik OK and then assign the next task to all users....

for the second point, I prefer the second case: ressource pool can be different from target rôle.    Nice to have, can set several role to one resource pool.

regards

Gregory

[Pekholm]

I agree that is mpst common usecase that you like to use a specific role in the context team as resource pool

[BjoernRueegg]

And also self release has to be a preference which can be set, so the creator of the PN can't choose himself for releasing.

At the moment the process is not QA approve!

[rdanner]

I would prefer that workflow tasks behave like the routing wizard, where the user selects the participants from a list. Having one method where you select the participants such as with the routing wizard, and another such as the workflow set-up participants tasks where you remove un-wanted participants is contradictory and confusing to the user. One method to select participants is best, removing un-wanted participants is NOT intuitive, selecting participants from a list IS intuitive.

[JeffZemsky]

In 10.2 M030 the Resource Pool tab will have an additional selection for Roles to use to resolve to.  It will use the Participants in the Role for the Context team the workflow is run against.

[SteveVinyard]

*************EUREKA!!!******************

[rdanner]

But in that solution, will the user assigned the set up participants task still have to remove the unwanted participants (non-intuitive) from the controlled list? Or will they be able to select only those participants the task is to be assgined to (intuitive) from the controlled list? Being able to restrict the controlled list to a specific context role is a great enhancement, but the bigger issue for the user is having to remove users from that list instead of just selecting the desired participants from the controlled list. JUST LIKE THE APPROVAL PROCESS IN PROJECT! Users NEVER remove participants from the controlled list and therefore all participants in the role get the task instead of just a few. This creates unnessary work.

This is of course a Task Form issue

[PradeepRao]

It would be possible to specify, in the workflow template definition, that a role not be pre-resolved; that would ensure that there are no participants in the process team role at the time the process is initiated.

There would not be any need to remove unwanted participants in that case. Desired participants can be added in the Set Up Participants task.

[rdanner]

Agree

[vedderkris]

We have Users assinged to Groups and Groups assigned to Roles.  We would like to be able to expand the Groups or not show the group and just select the desired role and user for that particular change.