What is a Round Robin Dispatch?
A round robin dispatch is a way to distribute service tickets across servers or techs so that the burden of resolving tickets is evenly distributed. When round robin dispatching is done automatically, an algorithm assigns tickets without priority to great a system that is simple and equal. Usually, if a task is not completed within a certain timeframe, the algorithm will pass it on to the next person, thus keeping things moving efficiently.
The term “round robin” emerged in the 16th century, but the scheduling algorithm became popular in the athletics realm to refer to sports competitions where every participant would play every other participant so that games were fairly and evenly distributed. The general term now applies to any situation where each person takes on an equal share in turn.
Some ITSM tools allow you to create a service recipe for round-robin dispatching. If a ticket isn’t assigned, after a certain amount of time, it will automatically get routed to a team of techs and specifically bypass the techs who were just assigned new tickets.
Why Does it Matter?
Round robin dispatching is all about, to put it simply, taking turns. In the era of digital transformation, when ticket requests steadily stream into most IT departments, a fair and equal way of distributing tickets is crucial in ensuring that no one is overwhelmed by a stream of new tickets. It also helps speed up ticket resolution by automatically moving tickets to the right place if they haven’t yet been resolved.
