Ownership of Items

SBM provides two types of ownership: primary ownership and secondary ownership. Primary ownership means that a single user is responsible for an item while it resides in a particular state. Secondary ownership lets multiple users own an item in a state. With appropriate privileges, secondary owners can view, update, and transition items as needed.

To provide accountability for primary items, an owner is designated for each state in the workflow. Each state may have a primary owner, a primary owner and secondary owners, or secondary owners.

Considerations For Setting Primary Ownership Of Items

You define primary ownership for each state by selecting a single User field, such as Manager, Engineer, or Tester, in the Owner drop-down list on the General tab for each state. The selections for the User field determine who is available as a primary owner. You can specify role selections for the field in SBM Composer. User and group selections for User fields are made in SBM Application Administrator.

The selections from that User field are available to users, but they can only select a single user as a primary owner for each state in which the the item resides. This ensures that primary items always have one user who is primarily responsible for it while it resides in each state.

Consider the following when you set primary ownership of items:

Considerations for Secondary Ownership

You can set up a workflow so that one or more users are secondarily responsible for items in a particular state. For example, you can set up a queue into which all new incidents are submitted and let users who are specified as secondary owners for new incidents transition items from the queue into their inbox. Or, you can designate a single user as a secondary owner for a particular state, letting this user transition items from that state instead of the primary owner.

A User, Multi-User, or Multi-Group field can be used to populate the secondary ownership property. The selections for the User, Multi-User, or Multi-Group field determine which users and groups are available as secondary owners. You can also specify whether users can select individual users or groups as secondary owners.

Consider the following when you set secondary ownership of items:

If you configured your workflow so that only secondary ownership is enabled for a state, the primary owner value displays as "None" in the state change history, change history, and the Owner field.