Declining an Assignment
Now let’s take a look at the Decline button in the toolbar. Click on request #704660 in your inbox and read through its details. Assume that Tom does not know anything about the Time Off Request service and that his team’s coordinator accidentally assigned this request to Tom. See if you can decline this request.
Do not move away from request #704660 after you have declined it; you will need it to complete Exercise 6.
Questions:
What happened to the information you entered in the pop-up window?
A note was added to the request with this information.
Where did the request go after you declined it and why?
The request remains assigned to the Application Development team, but Tom is no longer the member to which it is assigned. This ensures that the request gets listed again (with a blue dot next to it) in the “My Inbox” view of the Application Development team’s coordinator.
The following rules drive the decline function:
- When a request is assigned to a team member and when this team member declines the request, the request will return to the unassigned requests for that team.
- When a request that is not yet assigned to a team member is declined, the request will return to the previous team (the team that assigned the request to the actual team).
- When there is no previous team (for example when a request is registered by an end-user on the self service portal and gets assigned to the Service Desk) the decline function is not available (you cannot decline a request and return it to the end-user).
The number of declines in a support organization is an important KPI: when too many requests get declined, the efficiency of the support organization is degraded and service management should check the reasons why this happens.
Question:
What are valid reasons to decline a request?
For a request that has been declined to the previous team:
- when the wrong service has been selected and this request should not have been assigned to your team, or
- when important information is missing and the previous team should have included this info to the request.
For a request that has been assigned to a team member and the team member declined the request to the team queue:
- when the team member does not have the right experience or knowledge to resolve the request, or
- when the team member has not enough time (e.g. holiday starts the next day) to resolve the request in time.
The following video provides an overview of the exercise: