How do you add or change Form Assignments in PerformancePoint Planning?

I have had this question come up a bunch of times with customers and partners. It usually surfaces when you are asking yourself some of these questions:

• "Why is it that when I add a new form to an existing cycle it does not show up for user assignments?"
• "What are the children nodes in the Molder after I create a Cycle?"

I could spend all day writing about Process Management but I will scope this blog entry because typically when you are asking these questions you are experiencing the difference in behavior between Cycle and Form Assignment definitions and instances.  This does get confusing because the differences between a definition and an instance in Modeler are negligible and their behavior is not always intuitive.  Let me do my best to try and explain how this works…

When you create a cycle, what you are actually creating is a cycle definition.  This cycle definition will spawn a cycle instance once the cycle is saved and you reach the start time of the cycle definition.  The start and end time are set in the cycle creation the wizard.  When you define a cycle, you also have the option to create it as a recurring cycle. That is, a new cycle instance will be spawned based on a schedule. Say for example, a Monthly Budget cycle definition would spawn a new cycle instance the first day of each month for a monthly budget process. If you have a recurring cycle, you will see multiple cycle instances for the recurring periods in the planning modeler once they are spawned. Once you have a cycle instance spawned, changing the cycle definition will not change the cycle instance. A cycle instance is never changed based on a change to the definition. You can think of the definition as the template that is used to create the instances. After they are created, the link between definition and instance is broken except for that fact that the instance is related to the underlying definition.

Here is a screen shot that illustrates cycle definitions and cycle instances:

If you want to change a cycle instance you need to either:

1. Update the specific instance on the cycle instance summary page or
2. Purge all cycle instances and regenerate new cycle instances from the updated cycle definition. You can do this from the Available Actions link on the Process Scheduling Tasks window.

    

Since Cycles are just containers for form assignments and jobs, we must also look at how those are defined and how instances are created also.

Each cycle instance can have 1 or more form assignments that will function as the actually user assignment that will be used to collect data.  Typically, you will create a form assignment definition on the cycle definition.  When done, each cycle instance created from that point on will look at the Cycle definitions form assignments and create those form assignments for the new cycle instance.  They key to this statement is that only for future cycle instances will the modifications to the form assignments be used.  If you create a cycle instance and then you add a new form to the cycle definition, the new form assignment will not be included any current or past cycle instances. 

Here is a screen shot for the Assignment Definition:

As you can see, the cycle is the MonthlyBudget definition. The form associated with this cycle definition is a form assignment definition. What this show is that any cycle instance created from the MonthlyBudget cycle will include the form assignment below.

 

Below, is a screen shot of a cycle instance and its associated form instances:

As you can see, the cycle is the MontlyBuget-Sep07_1 cycle instance is the instance for the month of September based off of the MonthlyBudget cycle. There are 2 instances below because in my Form Assignment definition I created the contributor of the assignment as a business role. My users Cindy and John are the users in that role. Again, if I were to change the Form Assignment definition within the cycle definition after these instances were created, those changes would not be reflected in this cycle instance.

 

Understanding the concepts of instances and definition should make answering the question 'How I do create or update a form assignment for an existing cycle instance'? What you need to do is actually change the cycle instance.  There are two ways of doing this.

Option one: you can go to the cycle instance and add additional form assignments.  After adding a new form assignment you start the assignment.  This can be done by clicking the assignment, choosing 'Available Actions' on the Assignment Tasks window and selecting start.  This process will only add the form assignment for the cycle instance and will not be applied to any future create cycle instances.

Option two: Create the new form assignment on the cycle definition and then regenerate the forms assignments cycle instance based off the new form assignments in the cycle definition.  To regenerate the forms in the cycle instance, you click on the cycle instance and then choose 'Regenerate' from the Assignment Actions window.  Also, by making this change to the cycle definition, all future cycle instances will use the form assignments added to the cycle definition.

Hope this helps.

Kevin