Understanding Job Allocation

Introduction

A job needs to have an Allocation date, a user/group and optionally a Place in order to define “when” the job is supposed to be done, by “who” and “where”.

“Who” could be a single user or a group of users. With this information you will be able to know which task has been allocated to you 

“When” define the date where the job should be started.

“Where” is used to allocate a place to a job.

If a job has no allocation, it will never show up in one of your user environment and the parent sequence will be waiting forever. Only user jobs needs allocation to be defined.

Definitions

Allocation date

This is the date set to actually do the job. 

Deadline

This is the limit when the job should be done. 

User/group allocated

User or group of users that are supposed to accept or reject the job.

Job Allocation view

This view let you display the current allocation for a specific date and define or change allocation for all jobs.

The default setup shows you the jobs allocated for September 9th, 2020

Let’s start a sequence from the “Select and make proxy“ template. This sequence has 4 steps   including 2 UI Jobs.

After starting the sequence, the Job Allocation View look like that

Changing allocation date

If you want to change the allocated date, you need to drag the job(s) to the desired date.

And your Job Allocation should look like that. One Job is due today and one is due in 2 days.

In the right upper corner you will find 2 buttons: “Unallocated jobs” and a Toggle calendar button.

By clicking on the Toggle calendar button, you can switch from a view per date to a view of all UI Job regardless of when they have been allocated.

Changing allocation User/Group

If you need to define or edit the user/group allocation, you need to drag you job to the user or group of your choice.

Deallocating a job

If you need to deallocate a job, drag it to the button “Unallocated Jobs” and drop it there. 

The unallocated jobs will be displayed by clicking on the “Unallocated Jobs” button. One more time, select the jobs and drag them to desired date.

Allocating a UI Job to a Place

To change the allocated room, click on the Places link on the left.

and drag the selected place to the UI Job.

UI Job Pre-allocation

When designing your sequence, you may have always the same user/group allocated to a UI Job. 

In this case double-click on the UI Job and select the user or the group to be allocated on the “Allocation” tab.