Prevent assigning tickets to users if they are already occupied with other tickets

Jyoti Manandhar_87spqw

Currently, one user is occupied with multiple issues and all of them are in progress most of the time. This is causing context switching and delays to complete the tickets. Is there any way to prevent assigning tickets to users if they already have one ticket assigned in a particular phase?

Walter Buggenhout

Hi @Jyoti Manandhar,

A lot of this boils down to the way you organise work within your teams and the work agreements being applied.

Kanban teams can set WIP (Work in Progress) limits to the columns on their kanban board. When too many items are being worked on - which is something you need to define an agreement for - the board column will be highlighted in red, indicating that no more work should be started. This is not restrictive, so it acts as a signal to the team. Also, kanban implies that people pick up work from a prioritised backlog, rather than being assigned to stuff.

When you have a dispatching mechanism in place, it is okay to expect from the person responsible for assigning work to check the workload of team members before doing so. It is not very hard to make this visible on a dashboard for the team (e.g. with a 2-dimensional issue statistics gadget showing issues to do / in progress per assignee).

There are many cases where assigning work is part of a bigger planning process. Assigning an issue to someone does not necessarily have to mean the assignee has to start working on the issue immediately. It may very well be a perfect way to build a queue of work for a person to pick up over the next couple of weeks. If you would try to block assigning work to someone because he/she already has other stuff in the works, you may be causing other issues related to forward planning over a longer time.

Anyway - from my experience the type of issue you describe can be tackled through communication and transparency within the team rather than trying to enforce this in the tool. Which would be very difficult to enforce technically, by the way.

Hope this helps!