The responsibility for a ticket or work orders can be assigned or a Maximo user can take ownership. The owner performs an administrative function to ensure that the ticket is reviewed or investigated and the work order is executed successfully. The owner need not be the person who executes the work order. The owner of the ticket or work order can be changed during its life and this change of ownership can be tracked over time.

On each class of ticket (service request, incident and problem) and work order (work order, activity, change and release) there are three fields:

• Owner (OWNER)
• Owner Group (OWNERGROUP)
• Assigned Owner Group (ASSIGNEDOWNERGROUP)

Ownership is tracked during the life of a ticket or work order. For tickets the object storing the ownership records is TKOWNERHISTORY and for work orders it is WOOWNERHISTORY. The ownership history can be seen in the same dialog box as the status history, action View History (for tickets) or View Work Order History.

The three fields, Owner, Owner Group and Assigned Owner Group will also be found in job plans at the header and task level (objects JOBPLAN, JOBTASK), on a preventive maintenance record (object PM), on a ticket template at the header and activity level (objects TKTEMPLATE, TKTEMPLTACTIVITY) and on the work view (object WORKVIEW). Ownership can be automatically changed using Workflow or an Escalation. For those clients with Maximo for Service Providers then a Response Plan can automatically set ownership.

When creating a follow-up work order, or one type of work order from another type of work order then the crossover domain WO2WO will copy the attributes OWNER and OWNERGROUP. These fields do not get copied by default when creating a ticket from another type of ticket (crossover domain TCKT2TCKT) or when creating a work order from a ticket (crossover domain TICKET2WO) or when creating a ticket from a work order (crossover domain (WO2TCKT). This is because the responsibility for each type of ticket is likely to be different and the responsibility for a work order could be different from the ticket that originated that work order. In these cases the responsibility can be automatically assigned by using a ticket template or a job plan.

There are two actions on the ticket and work order based applications that operate either against the current record or from the List tab against a selected set of records:

• Take Ownership is a single click action for setting the current user as the owner of the record.
• Select Owner opens a dialog box with two tabs Persons or Person Groups. If there is a current owner group then this is used to filter the persons by that group including those listed in the “Alternates for” table window on the Person Group.

The fields Owner and Owner Group on a ticket or work order are read-only you can only change them by using one of the two actions Take Ownership or Select Owner. They are also mutually exclusive, only one of the fields can have a value. From the example above if you make Lou Granger the owner then the owner group field is made null. But Lou Granger could belong to multiple Person Groups therefore what Person Group is still taking responsibility? The answer can be found from the hidden field assigned owner group.

The setting of the attribute ASSIGNEDOWNERGROUP is as follows:

• When a new record is created and the action Take Ownership is made then ASSIGNEDOWNERGROUP is null as is OWNERGROUP.
• If action Select Owner is used and a Person Group is picked then ASSIGNEDOWNERGROUP will be set to the chosen Owner Group.
• If action Select Owner is used and a Person is picked then ASSIGNEDOWNERGROUP is set to the Person Group associated with the selected Person.
• If action Take Ownership is made then the ASSIGNEDOWNERGROUP remains the same, it is not changed, even if the new owner is not a member of the associated Person Group that is the current assigned owner group.

In the Select Owner dialog box the Shift field shows the shift on the Person record. The Open Work column shows a count of the number of open work orders and tickets for each person. Open means tickets that are not at RESOLVED or CLOSED status and work orders which are not at COMP, CLOSE or CAN status. Note. Tasks with ownership applied will also be included in this count.

If a work order is created and there is an owner then as you create tasks the owner will be copied to the tasks due to the WO2WO crossover domain. On the other hand if a work order is created and a Job Plan is applied prior to setting the ownership then the owner on the tasks will be left blank. If the owner is set first and the job plan is applied afterwards then the owner will be copied to all the tasks. Therefore, if the Open Work field is used as a means of seeing who is overloaded with work and who is not then care must be taken to understand when ownership is applied. Note. The Owner and Owner Group are also fields on the Job Plan and Job Task and might then be set when the Job Plan is applied.

Note. From the two screenshots in this blog the Person Group does not show the description of the Person Group, hence best practise is to provide a meaningful Person Group reference rather than using the autokey, this would require changing the default insert setting on the Person Group application.