Assignment rules allow you to specify conditions for which a particular assignment group and/or assigned to person should be assigned to work on a particular task. Assignment rules work fine, but as I’ve worked with clients I’ve come across some common scenarios that can’t be solved with the out-of-box setup. The primary issue with assignment rules is that they only run as a record is submitted and they only run if an assignment has not been made already to the ticket being saved. Along with this, most organizations I’ve worked with choose to make the ‘Assignment group’ field mandatory. Because of this, the person working the ticket always has to make some sort of assignment before saving the record (meaning that the assignment rules never get run). I learned how to work around this issue on one of my very first Service-now implementations and I almost always implement this solution as part of any Incident Management rollout. The out-of-box assignment rules are documented here. This article shows how you can apply the same customizations to your Service-now implementation that I use for my clients. This entire customization has also been packaged into an ‘Assignment Rule Lookup’ update set to save time in implementing.

This customization includes the following features:

• Easy to view and manage lookup table for common assignments
• Dynamic lookup/population of assignment values as you work on the Incident form