Each assignment in Survey Solutions has a status, which can be one of the following: OPEN, COMPLETED, CLOSED.

The status of an assignment determines how this assignment appears in various dialogs and what actions are available to the users handling it.

Every assignment demands a certain number of interviews to be delivered, which can be 1, some finite number or an infinite number of interviews. An assignment that is in the status OPEN is an assignment that demands the outstanding interviews to be delivered. Every started interview reduces the demand by 1, and the assignment disappears automatically when the interviewer starts the requested number of interviews.

An interviewer, however, may find herself in an environment when there are no suitable units (households, persons, enterprises, etc) to fulfill the demand of the assignment. This is most logical for assignments demanding infinite amount of interviews, but may occur for the finite assignments as well.

When this happens it is important to signal to the supervisory staff that the assignment is completed with insufficient number of units surveyed. An interviewer does that by manually declaring an assignment as COMPLETED. The cards corresponding to the assignments in the status COMPLETED disappear from their dashboards automatically after a successful synchronization. Until the synchronization succeeds, the interviewer may change her mind and reopen an assignment (for example, if she discovers other units available for enumeration already after completing the assignment).

Assignments in the status COMPLETED need to be reviewed by the supervisory staff, who can agree and change the status to CLOSED or disagree and restore the OPEN status.

CLOSED status is terminal. No user is expected to do anything with the assignments in this status. Though the HQ-staff have the capacity to re-open such assignments.

Assignments are sent to the interviewers only if they have both:

• outstanding interviews to be collected, and
• status OPEN.

Thus assignments will not be sent to the interviewers (and will be taken away from their dashboards) if the number of interviews remaining to be collected is zero or the status is anything else than OPEN.

Headquarters users don’t have to wait for the supervisors to act, and can change the assignment status from COMPLETED to CLOSED if they feel they have sufficient information to do so. In particular, this information can be present in the optional comment left by the interviewer when completing the assignment.

If the supervisor can’t make the decision immediately and wants to prevent the interviewer from reopening the assignment (and to collect more interviews) it is possible by reassigning the completed assignment to herself.

Note that the status of an assignment is completely independent from its archival status (whether it is active or archived). If an assignment in any status is archived, and subsequently un-archived, it appears active in the same status as before the archival.

The Assignments page at the HQ has a filter for filtering assignments by status. The user (commonly HQ or a supervisor) may opt to see assignments in any status or assignments in a particular status. This helps to focus on the assignments that still need to be fulfilled, or acted upon.

Supervisors and HQ users have a capacity to REOPEN a closed assignment as well, if they discover other eligible units already after that assignment has been closed.

An earlier available action to Close an assignment by revising its size to the number of collected interviews (introduced in version 19.10 of Survey Solutions) remains available, but is renamed to Downsize in version 26.06.

Survey Solutions APIs provide specific functionality to obtain the current status of an assignment or to change this status if needed for integration with other systems.

A user in the role administrator may decide to restrict the ability of other users (supervisors, interviewers) to modify assignments’ statuses. For this she can uncheck the checkboxes in the workspace settings (at the Devices tab):

• “Allow supervisors to change assignment statuses”
• “Allow interviewers to change assignment statuses”.

Note that both actions are available (checked) by default. Users updating from earlier versions need to review this functionality and decide whether it is desirable to have it or disable it in the workspace settings to maintain work flows that were set up earlier.