Welcome to Workforce! In this exercise, you are a fire captain with the San Diego Fire Department. One of your jobs is to manage hydrant inspections by creating assignments for the work and assigning them to firefighters to complete. The city of San Diego's GIS administrator created a Workforce project for you to use to manage the inspections, and you have created some assignments, but you have yet to use it to manage assignments and monitor the inspections as your firefighters work in the field. The firefighters are ready to head out, so you need to assign them the inspections they need to complete.
Note:
For this particular city and its roles and team structures, this alignment of the fire captain as the dispatcher and the firefighters as the mobile workers makes sense: those are the people who fill those roles in hydrant inspections in San Diego. In another city, this may not be the case. For example, in other cities, hydrant inspections are managed and completed by the water department, and different people fill these roles. The key thing to understand here is that there is a relationship between the dispatcher and the mobile worker, and the Workforce project mirrors that relationship: you can configure it as it makes sense for your organization when you create your own project.
To complete this exercise, you must be a dispatcher in the Workforce project. Contact your project owner if you can't open the project.
Open the Workforce project
The city's GIS administrator already created the Workforce project for hydrant inspections and shared it with you. Open that project to see the outstanding assignments.
Note:
If you are following these exercises to explore Workforce, first complete the workflows in Create your first project and Create your first assignment, and then return here to use that project. While you are creating assignments, go ahead and create a few without assigning them so that you have some unassigned work to use during this exercise.
- Open the ArcGIS Workforce web app. Sign in to your ArcGIS organizational account.
Using ArcGIS Online
Go to https://workforce.arcgis.com.
Using ArcGIS Enterprise
Go to https://host.domain.com/webadaptor/apps/workforce/ (where host, domain, and webadaptor are replaced by information about your portal).
The Projects page appears, showing any projects that you've created or that you participate in as a dispatcher or mobile worker.
- Open the Hydrant Inspections project.
You see all the current assignments and mobile workers. You see them both on the map and in the lists to the left of the map. If the project was just created, your map and assignments list are empty, but the workers list contains the mobile workers who were added to the project.
Note:
Mobile workers appear on the map once they have signed in and have a location. They are available in the workers list once they are added to the project.
Assign a single assignment
While following the exercise to create your first assignment, you reviewed the assignments you made, checking their details. To assign work after it's created, you'll follow similar steps.
- In the assignments list, click Status and choose Unassigned to see all the unassigned work in the project.
- Choose any of the assignments to assign and go to the details of the assignment by clicking its type in the assignments list.
The assignment is centered on the map.
Tip:
You could also select the assignment in the list and assign it there. You'll learn how to do this for multiple assignments when you reassign some in the next section, but you could do it for a single assignment as well.
- Click Assign. Use the distance shown under the thumbnails to choose the closest mobile worker.
The assignment is assigned to the chosen mobile worker. The mobile worker is notified about the new work. If a critical assignment is chosen, the mobile worker is prompted to acknowledge the work. When they do so, the Critical label gets less prominent in your dispatcher view: its display changes from
to 
.Tip:
If reassigning an assignment, you won't see Assign. Instead, click the name of the currently assigned user to see the drop-down list of mobile workers.
Reassign assignments
One of your mobile workers is going to be out for a while. You need to reassign all her assigned work to another mobile worker.
As the dispatcher, you can reassign work that is assigned, paused, or declined. However, as soon as the firefighter starts an inspection and the assignment is in progress, you can't reassign it. While in progress, the assignment is controlled by the mobile worker actively working on it. You as the dispatcher control it in any other state, including unassigned, assigned, paused, completed, or declined.
- In the assignments list, click Assignee and choose the name of the mobile worker that will be out. For purposes of this exercise, choose any of them.
That mobile worker's assignments display in the assignments list.
- Still in the assignments list, click Status and choose Assigned.
For this exercise, you'll just reassign her assigned work. In practice, the Status filter is a multiselect field, and you could see a list of her assignments with other statuses as well. Remember you have to exclude In Progess and Completed assignments to successfully reassign the other assignments.
- Click the check box next to the count of assignments that are assigned to this mobile worker.
All of her assignments are selected.
- Click Assign and choose the mobile worker that will cover while the original mobile worker is out.
The assignments are assigned to the new mobile worker. The original mobile worker no longer sees the work in their To Do list. The new mobile worker is notified about the new work. If any critical assignments were reassigned, the new mobile worker is prompted to acknowledge the work. When they do so, the Critical label gets less prominent in your dispatcher view: its display changes from
to .Tip:
If the original mobile worker started or completed any of the work, Assign is disabled and you won't be able to reassign the selected assignments. Deselect any in progress or completed assignments by clicking the check box next to them, and Assign becomes enabled.
Next steps
Now that you have seen how to assign single and multiple assignments, try sending out some more work. Here are some things to try:
- Assign all the medium priority work to a single mobile worker—Filter the list by priority, select the relevant assignments, and assign them. Watch out for any in progress or completed assignments!
- Reassign work that was declined—Filter the list to show declined work, which was assigned but that the mobile worker was unable to do. Reassign it so that it is handled by another mobile worker, or assign it back to the original mobile worker.
You can also continue with the Complete your first assignment exercise to see how mobile workers use the Workforce mobile app to view and complete their assignments.