About Task Allocation

You can use Oracle Thesaurus Management System (TMS) to distribute coding and QA tasks—classifying omissions, approving VTAs, and approving Action assignments—to people in your organization. You can also keep track of each person's workload, and each person can track his or her own tasks.

You can set up task allocation to work in several different ways:

• Manual Pool Allocation. As omissions, unapproved VTAs, and Action assignments are created, they accumulate in a pool until you manually allocate them to other TMS users through either the Allocate Tasks by Quantity or the Allocate Tasks by Term window.

• Automatic Pool Allocation. Tasks—omissions, unapproved VTAs, and Action assignments—accumulate in a pool until you invoke a process to allocate them to other users. You allocate only one type of task at a time from one dictionary/domain (or, in the case of VTAs, dictionary/global) combination at a time, to the users you specify. You can select an algorithm that takes into account only the capacity you define for each worker, or an algorithm that uses capacity plus current workload. You run the allocation process from the Allocate Tasks by Quantity window.

• Direct Allocation. Omissions, unapproved VTAs, and unapproved Action assignments do not accumulate in a pool. TMS allocates them to users as they are created, according to the user capacities you define.

  TMS performs direct allocation in the following circumstances:

  • on omissions that enter TMS through Batch Validation

  • on terms with associated tasks that enter TMS through Disconnected System Integration (DSI)

  • on VTAs that are created by manually classifying an omission where VTA approval is required

  • on VTAs that are created proactively

  • on actions assigned to omissions where approval is required

  However, TMS does not perform direct allocation on omissions or unapproved VTAs or actions that existed before direct allocation was set up, and if a term is manually unallocated, direct allocation does not reallocate it.

  Direct allocation will not allocate an approval task to the same user who created the unapproved VTA or unapproved Action assignment.

  You can still do automatic and manual pooled allocation, reallocation, and unallocation even when you are using Direct Allocation. TMS prevents two sessions from running automatic pooled allocation at the same time to avoid conflicts. TMS manages conflicts between direct allocation and automatic pooled allocation internally to prevent conflicts.

Using the Task Allocation feature is not required. You specify separately for each type of task—omissions, unapproved VTAs, and unapproved Action assignments—in a reference codelist whether you want to use Task Allocation at all, and if so, whether you want to use direct or pool allocation; see Setting Task Allocation Reference Codelist Values.

Approving VTAs and Action assignments are also not required. You specify whether to require these approvals for each domain/dictionary combination; see Assigning a Dictionary to a Domain. You can also require approval for VTAs and actions assigned by certain users through the users' profile settings; see Defining Users.

Note:

You can only require approval for, and therefore allocate tasks for, Answerable Actions. Internal Actions with base Answerable Actions are used for this purpose.

TMS assigns a status to each omission, VTA, and Action as it progresses to each new life cycle stage; see Term Statuses.