How Assignment Works

Whenever a stage instance activates, the assignment engine runs automatically to find its assignee. It applies a fixed sequence of filters, narrowing the eligible pool at each step.

The filter order

1. Role — only users holding the stage's required role are considered at all.
2. Skill — if the stage has skill requirements tied to a dropdown field (see Skills & Languages), only users whose profile matches those skill values remain.
3. Language — language is typically modeled as a skill field itself, but is called out separately here because it's the most common matching criterion in media production workflows.
4. Roster — if the stage is configured to "check roster," only users marked present and on-shift for the current day remain eligible (see Roster & Shifts).
5. Workload cap — users already at their maximum number of active tickets are excluded, even if otherwise eligible.
6. Round Robin — among whoever remains after all the filters above, the engine picks whoever has gone longest without receiving a new assignment, keeping distribution fair over time.

Fallback behavior

If every filter is applied and no eligible user remains — nobody with the right role and skill is on shift and under their workload cap — the stage doesn't just sit unassigned indefinitely. Two fallback behaviors are available, configured per stage:

• Notify a supervisor, so a person can step in and assign the stage manually, or adjust roster/workload constraints to unblock it.
• Route to an AI Agent, if the stage has one configured as a fallback assignee type — useful for stages like a first-pass script draft, where an AI Agent completing the work immediately is preferable to a stage sitting idle.

Assignment history

Every assignment — and every reassignment, whether manual or automatic — is logged against the ticket's timeline, with a timestamp and the reason (initial Round Robin pick, supervisor manual override, fallback trigger). Anyone opening the ticket later can see exactly who has held this stage and when, not just who holds it now.

Next, Skills & Languages covers exactly how skill matching gets configured on both the user and the field side.