VLJ Support: Task auto-distribution discrepancy

[araposo-tistatech]

User or job story

VLJ Support's task assignments are distributed in a round robin fashion to ensure tasks are evenly distributed among the team. There appears to be an issue with the distribution logic as the tasks are not being evenly distributed at this time.

Acceptance criteria

• VLJ Support tasks are distributed equally among the team

Background/context

Issue was flagged by the Deputy Branch Chief Veteran Law Judge Support Branch

Technical notes

Investigation: https://hackmd.io/@hschallh/rJyoSPJYL

[yoomlam]

https://github.com/department-of-veterans-affairs/caseflow/wiki/Automatic-Task-Distribution#vlj-support-round-robin

[ajspotts]

what is this chart?

1 | 
2 | |
3 | |||||||
5 | ||||
8 | 

Why 2?

• Investigation optimism

Why 3?

• Time for investigation (same reasons as 5)

Why 5?

• Investigation uncertainty
• Commit to the time to make sure we fix the problem

[lomky]

Investigation complete

• The very low number of tasksonly shows up for Admin users, who are assigned manually. These results can be disregarded as the auto-distribution applies to non-admin members of the team
• The bug is traced back to how we re-architectued putting tasks on timed holds.
  • The VLJ Support round robin is based off of the generic Task class, as we want to account for both ColocatedTasks and MailTasks assigned to the team.
  • However, when we migrated timed holds from being on a task to being their own task type, they also appear if you query Task without any extra checks
  • Fix: confirm that our query analyzing who was most recently assigned a task to pick thte next person does not consider 'user invisible' tasks, such as TimedHoldTasks

[lomky]

The other consumer of the RoundRobin logic is BvaDispatch, however they explicitly look for BvaDispatchTask and are thus unaffected by this bug

[lomky]

@araposo-tistatech The fix for this is merged and will go out tomorrow!

I suggest we keep this issue open for another week or two and keep an eye on tasks assigned moving forward to watch for any other potential issues.

[araposo-tistatech]

@lomky unfortunately, the VLJ Support team has reported that this issue has not been resolved. Please see their findings below:

"It appears that the work distribution issue for VLJ Support has not been resolved. Please see below chart which shows the amount of work assigned to each employee during the period of May 9 through May 16, 2020. I pulled this information from Tableau because we are not able to get a clear/accurate number from the VLJ Work Queue. I am hopeful that your team will be able to correct this issue to ensure that work is being distributed evenly. Any assistance you can provide with getting this corrected is much appreciated. Please note that Tirza Austin-Jenkins departed the Board on May 8th and she was given admin rights at the end of April so that she would not receive any additional work that she couldn’t complete.

Employee Name	Legacy Tableau View	AMA Tableau View
Bergeron, Ronald	49	17
Clanton, Lazette	42	24
Crews, Tashauna	25	8
Drayton, Maleka	49	14
Jenkins, Michael	9	2
Johnson, Andre	39	12
Jones, Maurice	33	9
Koroma, Marvin	26	13
Lewis, Lofrandra	42	8
Maiden, Linda	28	11
Marshall, Patrice	40	3
Moss, Andrea	30	9
Seay, Randy	31	9
Totten-Browning, Pam	38	9
Wiggins, Gwen	37	7
Tirza-Austin-Jenkins	3	0
Totals	512	153	665
"

I realize it is probably very unlikely, but is it possible that the data in Tableau could be off?

[yoomlam]

@araposo-tistatech My 2 cents: I wouldn't expect the numbers to even out immediately since cases that have already been assigned (before the fix) will stay with the current assignee.

[araposo-tistatech]

@yoomlam appreciate the input! I've gone back to VLJ Support with your note and will await feedback.

[hschallhorn]

Please note that Tirza Austin-Jenkins departed the Board on May 8th and she was given admin rights at the end of April so that she would not receive any additional work that she couldn’t complete.

We should direct them to make this user inactive in caseflow rather than making them an admin. This will ensure they are not assigned any more tasks, but the correct way

[lomky]

@araposo-tistatech The round robin is now working as intended.

Over the last 6 days 287 VLJ Support Tasks have been assigned. They have gone out evenly at approx ~20 tasks per user. There is one user with 4, but as of last week that person was marked as an Admin, and it looks like they were only added back into the round robin today.

If they need us to adjust anything retroactively, we can, but we'd need their guidance on how to go about that to avoid interrupting anyone's work.

# Gather all the Tasks assigned the VLJ Support in the past 6 days
> org_tasks = Task.where(assigned_to: Colocated.singleton, created_at: 6.days.ago..Time.zone.now)
# Gather all the individual user tasks assigned to members of VLJ Support under those Org Tasks
>  tasks = ColocatedTask.where(parent: org_tasks, assigned_to_type: User.name, created_at: 6.days.ago..Time.zone.now) 
# How many tasks?
> tasks.count         
=> 287
# Assigned to whom?
> counts = tasks.group(:assigned_to_id).order(:count).count
=> {2062=>4, 2012=>19, 2014=>19, 1967=>20, 10630=>20, 1782=>20, 1885=>20, 2227=>20, 6169=>20, 1379=>20, 7798=>21, 10627=>21, 1829=>21, 2101=>21, 2141=>21}
# Map to names
>  pp counts.map { |user_id, count| [User.find(user_id).full_name, count] }
=> [["MICHAEL JENKINS", 4],
 ["MAURICE JONES", 19],
 ["LAZETTE CLANTON", 19],
 ["RANDY SEAY", 20],
 ["TASHAUNA CREWS", 20],
 ["LINDA MAIDEN", 20],
 ["ANDRE JOHNSON", 20],
 ["MALEKA DRAYTON", 20],
 ["RONALD BERGERON", 20],
 ["PAMELA TOTTENBROWNING", 20],
 ["GWEN WIGGINS", 21],
 ["PATRICE MARSHALL", 21],
 ["LOFRANDRA LEWIS", 21],
 ["ANDREA MOSS", 21],
 ["MARVIN KOROMA", 21]]

# why does M Jenkins only have 4? 
# They were marked as a VLJ Support Admin as of last week, and admins don't get autoassigned.
# so their number is different because they were previously not in the round robin

[araposo-tistatech]

Maria from the VLJ support team got back to us stating two users (Lazette Clanton & Ronald Bergeron) are still receiving more tasks then other users. Below is the report she provided (May 25th - June 3rd):

Based on the previous note Kat provided it does appear the tasks are being distributed evenly. Can we pull an updated report to ensure nothing has changed? I suspect the discrepancy is some users are completing their tasks faster than others, but I would like to present some data when I respond.