Assignment Rules & Assignment Lookup Rules

Speed and accuracy are the two most important things in an IT environment. With manual processes, emergency tickets might get lost, delayed, or errors might increase. 

To avoid these delays and human errors, ServiceNow provides automated routing that tracks tickets and directs them to the correct teams. This topic focuses on ServiceNow assignment rules and how they help teams automate their tasks for efficiency. 

What are Assignment Rules? 

ServiceNow assignment rules automatically assign a task to users or teams based on predefined conditions. They eliminate the manual workflow by streamlining the ticketing process. 

Assignment rules are mainly used to: 

1. Automate task assignments on defined conditions to improve response times and reduce manual effort. 
2. Help track incidents, changes, and other records to the right users and teams. 
3. Minimize errors by defining conditions to match task types with appropriate assignees.

How to create Assignment Lookup Rules? 

The ServiceNow assignment rule configuration is:

1. Navigate to All → System Policy → Rules → Assignment Lookup Rules. 
2. Click New. 
3. Populate the assignment data lookup fields (see table). 
4. Click Submit. 

Note: Assignment rules and data lookup rules ServiceNow can be defined at the same time. While both rule types can certainly coexist within the system, they do not execute as a unified process on the same record. They are distinct mechanisms that can produce conflicting outcomes. The ‘Overwrite existing values’ option on the Data Lookup definition determines whether an already-assigned value gets replaced. 

Assignment Lookup Rules

ServiceNow Assignment Lookup rules are no-code configurations that automatically fill the Assignment Group and Assigned To fields based on specific conditions. The Assignment Lookup Rules assign incidents matching the values in the matcher field to the values in the Setter fields. 

Matcher fields include,

• Category: Select the category the data lookup matches against.
• Subcategory: Select the subcategory the data lookup matches against. 
• Configuration item: Select the configuration item that the data lookup matches against. 
• Location Select: The location the data lookup matches against.

Setter Fields include,

• Assignment group: Select the assignment group to assign the incident to. 
• Assigned to: Select the user to assign the incident to. 

Note: Any valid Assignment lookup rule requires one matcher field and one setter field. 

Conclusion

ServiceNow assignment lookup rules and assignment rules are to be chosen as per the complexity and scalability of the incidents. Both these rules help automate the tedious processes, saving hours of manual work. 

In the next chapter, we will be focusing on ServiceNow reports and dashboards, along with their various components, creation, and use.