Assignment Groups

An assignment group is a list of employees that are available from all the active employees. Assignment groups allow you to assign several employees to projects and project tasks quickly and share reports to multiple employees efficiently. The effect is the same as assigning the employees individually to projects and project tasks or sharing reports to individual employees.

Assignment groups are useful when you have tasks that need to be assigned to a large number of employees such as on internal or administrative projects. You can create an assignment group that contains all company employees and use this assignment group to assign all employees to tasks such as training, vacation, and holidays. The hours set on an assignment group on a task can either be split evenly among the group or kept the same across each employee in the assignment group. Another use is where you may have a group of resources with similar skills and can be interchangeable on a project task. To avoid having to set up each resource on the task when they begin work, the assignment group provides a simple solution.

Assignment Groups Best Practice Guidelines

Assignment groups are a convenient way to manage assignments for sets of users. However, excessive usage of assignment groups will lead to performance issues.

Assignments are stored in the project_task_assign table, and OpenAir uses this table heavily for various purposes. Excessive usage of assignment groups, especially if they contain many or all users, will lead to excessive growth of and updates to this table, which can cause performance issues. You should use other features instead of assignment groups where possible, depending on your requirements. You can use the following guidelines for best performance:

To grant access to all tasks in a project for a set of users, contact OpenAir Customer Support and request the following feature: Allow users to access all tasks, not only the ones they are assigned to. After you enable this feature, you only need to use the assignment group on one task in the project, instead of all tasks.
To grant access to a specific task for all users:
1. Contact OpenAir Customer Support and request the following feature: Allow all users to log time and expenses to a task.
2. On the task properties form, check the Allow all users to log time for this task box and click Save. All users will have access to this task

Note:

It is acceptable to use assignment groups heavily, depending on your business requirements. For best performance, where possible:

Avoid overusing assignment groups with all or most users.
Try to find alternative access control solutions, instead of creating many assignments to assignment groups contain hundreds or thousands of users.
Ensure that the task start date and end or finish date are as close together as possible. Longer durations will result in larger project recalculations and will degrade performance.

Creating an Assignment Group

OpenAir lets you create assignment group and include any number of active employees to the assignment group.

To create an assignment group:

Go to Administration > Application Settings > Projects > Assignment groups.
Click the Create button then New Assignment group.

The new assignment group form appear.
Enter a Name for the assignment group.
Select the Employees to include from the Available list, and click Add selected.
Enter Notes describing the purpose and use of the assignment group.
Check the Active assignment group box to make this assignment group active.
Click Save.

Tip:

If you have an assignment group for all employees, you can reduce administrative maintenance by enabling the Automatically Add New Users to Assignment Groups optional feature. See Automatically Add New Users to Assignment Groups.

Adding an Assignment Group to a Task

After you have created assignment groups, you can assign them to a task in the same way you assign named or generic resources to a task.

To add an assignment group to a task:

Go to Projects > Projects > [Select a project] > Phases/Tasks > List > [Select a task]
On the task properties form, scroll down to the Assignments form section.
Under the Assigned to column header, select the assignment group containing the resources you want to assign to the task from the dropdown list.
Click Save.